17.8.17

Sophia



Sophia will be 83 on September 20th of this year.

Sophia Loren was born as Sofia Scicolone at the Clinica Regina Margherita in Rome, Italy, on September 20, 1934.

Her father, Riccardo Scicolone, was married to another woman and refused to marry her mother, Romilda Villani, despite the fact that she was the mother of his two children (Sophia and her younger sister Maria Scicolone).

Growing up in the slums of Pozzuoli during the second World War without any support from her father, she experienced much sadness in her childhood.

Her life took an unexpected turn for the best when, at age 14, she entered into a beauty contest where she placed as one of the finalists.

It was there that Sophia caught the attention of film producer Carlo Ponti, some 22 years her senior, whom she eventually married in 1966 once he finally obtained a divorce from his first wife.

Some quotes attributed to 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.”

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

“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.”

“Sex appeal is fifty percent what you've got and fifty percent what people think you've got.”

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

“Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.”

“Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than the belief that she is beautiful.”

“If you haven't cried, your eyes cannot be beautiful”

“After all these years, I am still involved in the process of self-discovery. It's better to explore life and make mistakes than to play it safe. Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.”

“Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.”

“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.”

“When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. You are connected to your child and to all those who touch your lives. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.”

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

“Spaghetti can be eaten most successfully if you inhale it like a vacuum cleaner.”

“When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.”

"Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with the inner drive, go much farther than people with vastly superior talent”

“You must all, somewhere deep in your hearts, believe that you have a special beauty that is like no other and that is so valuable that you must not abandon it. Indeed, you must learn to cherish it.”

“At the dressing table, every woman has a chance to be an artist, and art, as Aristotle said, "completes what nature left unfinished.”

“Food makes people happy, it takes you back home, it says so many things that words can’t say.”

“Discipline is the great equalizer. If a young woman is beautiful but has no discipline, she will lose her looks as she grows older. If a plain woman is disciplined she will undoubtedly become more beautiful with time.”

“I have my own peculiar yardstick for measuring a man: Does he have the courage to cry in a moment of grief? Does he have the compassion not to hunt an animal? In his relationship with a woman, is he gentle? Real manliness is nurtured in kindness and gentleness, which I associate with intelligence, comprehension, tolerance, justice, education, and high morality. If only men realized how easy it is to open a woman's heart with kindness, and how many women close their hearts to the assaults of the Don Juans.”

“Every opportunity is a big opportunity,”

“As time passed there was no more buying food, no money, no supplies. On some days, we wouldn’t even have a crumb to eat. There’s a vivid scene in Nanni Loy’s The Four Days of Naples, a movie made after the war about the uprising of the Neapolitans against the occupying Germans, in which one of the young characters sinks his teeth into a loaf of bread so voraciously, so desperately, I can still identify with him. In those four famous days in late September, when Naples rose up against the Germans—even before the Allies arrived, it was the climax of a terrible period of deprivation and marked the beginning of the end of the war in Italy.”

“You have to believe in marriage and you have to believe in a relationship between two people. If you really think in your life that you have found the right person, you have to stick to it, even though there are ups and downs. If you really believe in your union, you have to nourish it and work for it, then you can really spend your life together forever.” 

― Sophia Loren

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