Elle Macpherson Quotes

Looking for some words of wisdom from one of the most successful mommas in the business world? Look no further than Elle Macpherson. The Australian supermodel and actress has been in the industry for over three decades, and during that time she’s collected a wealth of knowledge about success—both professional and personal. Here are some of the best quotes from Elle Macpherson on motherhood, work-life balance, and more.

  • Having children is my greatest achievement. It was my saviour. It switched my focus from the outside to the inside. My children are gifts, they remind me of what’s important.

    Elle Macpherson

  • People in the fashion industry have used the press a lot more than people in the film industry, because you have nothing to sell except for the image: The image is everything.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I’ve done all this stuff because it’s fun. It’s never been about fame.

    Elle Macpherson

  • For a while I was on the cover of every Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, which was regarded as the pinnacle of success in America.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I used to wear heels because I wanted to show people I wasn’t ashamed of being tall. But I don’t wear them any more because you don’t have to wear heels to be beautiful. I can’t even remember the last time I wore heels.

    Elle Macpherson

  • My favorite body part is my heart. Nothing beats loving and being loved.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I try to meditate every morning. It relaxes me, clears my mind, and sets my day off on the right foot before things get too manic.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I went to America on holiday when I was 17 and, before I knew it, I’d been signed up by an agency and had these obligations I didn’t understand, but which I couldn’t say no to. This industry chose me. But I did choose to make it fulfilling.

    Elle Macpherson

  • You check to see the facts are correct where business is concerned but if I read everything that was written about me, I’d end up feeling totally insecure about myself.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I don’t like everybody knowing what I’m doing, unless it’s related to a movie. I don’t like speaking to the press. I never did.

    Elle Macpherson

  • Focusing on the way I look makes me uncomfortable. I try to focus on the way I feel – I know what makes me feel better about myself. Reading my child a story makes me feel great, doing my hair nicely doesn’t.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I just happen to like the work. I like preparing for a role. I like reading. I like analyzing. I like literature. I like emotions. I like working with other actors.

    Elle Macpherson

  • You know, Mamet is not a huge writer of female parts. Most of his movies don’t even have women in them, so I’m lucky I’m in it at all.

    Elle Macpherson

  • Anyway, I believe you don’t fix the inside by putting something on the outside.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I eat like a horse!

    Elle Macpherson

  • I try to focus on eating seasonally and organic whenever possible. It can be a challenge, but it has a huge effect on my weight, my health, and the environment.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I choose movies, I never choose roles. I look at the script. I look at the director. I look at the other actors – and then the role.

    Elle Macpherson

  • If I have a choice between putting my kids to bed and going to a party, I’ll put my kids to bed. If I have a choice of going to a restaurant or having friends round, I’ll have friends round. Every time.

    Elle Macpherson

  • A celebrity name is never enough for an intelligent mass market… truly successful businesses are born of passion and heartfelt interest.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I like to make movies I like to watch.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I feel beautiful when I’m at peace with myself. When I’m serene, when I’m a good person, when I’ve been considerate of others.

    Elle Macpherson

  • The image is where you have dinner at night, who you’re seeing. It’s what car you drive and how you dress. People in the industry sell that, and it creates a dream. There’s nothing else.

    Elle Macpherson

  • But I do know focusing on the exterior doesn’t make me happy. If I want peace and serenity, it won’t be reached by getting thinner or fatter.

    Elle Macpherson

  • Acting and modeling have nothing to do with each other.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I wanted so badly to study ballet, but it was really all about wearing the tutu.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I don’t believe we own our children, they’re their own souls who make their own choices, we just guide and support them.

    Elle Macpherson

  • It’s not vanity to feel you have a right to be beautiful. Women are taught to feel we’re not good enough, that we must live up to someone else’s standards. But my aim is to cherish myself as I am.

    Elle Macpherson

  • For me, just being on the cover of a magazine wasn’t enough. I began to think, what value is there in doing something in which you have no creative input?

    Elle Macpherson

  • Being a public person doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a piece of meat for everybody.

    Elle Macpherson

  • As long as people want to see me in movies, and as long as I find it interesting, I’ll keep working.

    Elle Macpherson

  • The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.

    Elle Macpherson

  • If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.

    Elle Macpherson

  • All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.

    Elle Macpherson

  • If we don’t plant the right things, we will reap the wrong things. It goes without saying. And you don’t have to be, you know, a brilliant biochemist and you don’t have to have an IQ of 150. Just common sense tells you to be kind, ninny, fool. Be kind.

    Elle Macpherson

  • Nothing will work unless you do.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I love a Hebrew National hot dog with an ice-cold Corona – no lime. If the phone rings, I won’t answer until I’m done.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I learned a long time ago the wisest thing I can do is be on my own side, be an advocate for myself and others like me.

    Elle Macpherson

  • It is a no-fail, incontrovertible reality: If you get, give. If you learn, teach. You can’t do anything with that except do it.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I believe that each of us comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I did work in a strip club, but I didn’t strip. I danced, and I became very popular.

    Elle Macpherson

  • The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.

    Elle Macpherson

  • While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I know that when I pray, something wonderful happens. Not just to the person or persons for whom I’m praying, but also something wonderful happens to me. I’m grateful that I’m heard.

    Elle Macpherson

  • You can’t forgive without loving. And I don’t mean sentimentality. I don’t mean mush. I mean having enough courage to stand up and say, ‘I forgive. I’m finished with it.’

    Elle Macpherson

  • A wise woman wishes to be no one’s enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim.

    Elle Macpherson

  • The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I respect myself and insist upon it from everybody. And because I do it, I then respect everybody, too.

    Elle Macpherson

  • If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

    Elle Macpherson

  • The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

    Elle Macpherson

  • How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!

    Elle Macpherson

  • We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.

    Elle Macpherson

  • It’s good to remember that in crises, natural crises, human beings forget for awhile their ignorances, their biases, their prejudices. For a little while, neighbors help neighbors and strangers help strangers.

    Elle Macpherson

  • One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

    Elle Macpherson

  • Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I got my own back.

    Elle Macpherson

  • My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

    Elle Macpherson

  • Won’t it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.

    Elle Macpherson

  • You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.

    Elle Macpherson

  • There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

    Elle Macpherson

  • What is a fear of living? It’s being preeminently afraid of dying. It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity and spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility for yourself – for the time you take up and the space you occupy. If you don’t know what you’re here to do, then just do some good.

    Elle Macpherson

  • Fighting for one’s freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

    Elle Macpherson

  • Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up.

    Elle Macpherson

  • Won’t it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.

    Elle Macpherson

  • My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I got my own back.

    Elle Macpherson

  • Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.

    Elle Macpherson

  • If we accept being talked to any kind of a way, then we are telling ourselves we are not quite worth the best. And if we have the effrontery to talk to anybody with less than courtesy, we tell ourselves and the world we are not very intelligent.

    Elle Macpherson

  • The loss of young first love is so painful that it borders on the ludicrous.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I love the song ‘I Hope You Dance’ by Lee Ann Womack. I was going to write that song, but someone beat me to it.

    Elle Macpherson

  • If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.

    Elle Macpherson

  • All great achievements require time.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

    Elle Macpherson

  • Once you appreciate one of your blessings, one of your senses, your sense of hearing, then you begin to respect the sense of seeing and touching and tasting, you learn to respect all the senses.

    Elle Macpherson

  • We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I’m just like you – I want to be a good human being. I’m doing my best, and I’m working at it. And I’m trying to be a Christian. I’m always amazed when people walk up to me and say, ‘I’m a Christian.’ I always think, ‘Already? You’ve already got it?’ I’m working at it. And at my age, I’ll still be working at it at 96.

    Elle Macpherson

  • Whatever you want to do, if you want to be great at it, you have to love it and be able to make sacrifices for it.

    Elle Macpherson

  • The most important thing I can tell you about aging is this: If you really feel that you want to have an off-the-shoulder blouse and some big beads and thong sandals and a dirndl skirt and a magnolia in your hair, do it. Even if you’re wrinkled.

    Elle Macpherson

  • The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.

    Elle Macpherson

  • Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

    Elle Macpherson

  • A cynical young person is almost the saddest sight to see, because it means that he or she has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I admire people who dare to take the language, English, and understand it and understand the melody.

    Elle Macpherson

  • My mom was a terrible parent of young children. And thank God – I thank God every time I think of it – I was sent to my paternal grandmother. Ah, but my mother was a great parent of a young adult.

    Elle Macpherson

  • It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I’m convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they’re stones that don’t matter. As long as you’re breathing, it’s never too late to do some good.

    Elle Macpherson

  • We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

    Elle Macpherson

  • It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

    Elle Macpherson

  • My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.

    Elle Macpherson

  • I do like to have guns around. I don’t like to carry them. But I like – if somebody is going to come into my house and I have not put out the welcome mat, I want to stop them.

    Elle Macpherson

  • Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity.

    Elle Macpherson

  • Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin – find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

    Elle Macpherson

  • Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

    Elle Macpherson

  • The hope, the hope that lives in the breast of the black American, is just so tremendous that it overwhelms me sometimes.

    Elle Macpherson

  • There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

    Elle Macpherson

  • History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

    Elle Macpherson

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