Sophia Loren

Sophia: I was blessed with a sense of my own destiny. I have never sold myself short. I have never judged myself by other people's standards. I have always expected a great deal of myself, and if I fail, I fail myself.

Sophia: If you are a professional actor who has pride in his work, then the judgment of your peers should be important to you. I treasure each and every award I have ever received—and my Oscar is in a place of honor.

Sophia: It's a mistake to think that once you're done with school you need never learn anything new.

Sophia: You have to be born a sex symbol. You don't become one. If you're born with it, you'll have it even when you're 100 years old.

Sophia: There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.

Sophia: I've never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don't understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.

Sophia: I think the quality of sexiness comes from within. It is something that is in you.

Sophia: Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.

Sophia: Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than the belief that she is beautiful.

Sophia: Sex appeal is 50% what you've got and 50% what people think you've got.

Sophia: When I was a child, fear was common to my life—fear of having nothing to eat, fear of the other children taunting me at school because I was illegitimate, and particularly fear of the big bombers appearing overhead and dropping their lethal bursts from the sky.

Sophia: The two big advantages I had at birth were to have been born wise and to have been born in poverty.

Sophia: Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go so much further than people with vastly superior talent.

Sophia: A woman's dress should be like a barbed wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.