"To simply wake up every morning a better person than when I went to bed"
About this Quote
No red-carpet swagger here, just a daily dare: improvement as a private ritual. Sidney Poitier’s line works because it’s disarmingly modest on the surface while quietly radical underneath. “Simply” pretends this is easy, almost casual, but the sentence immediately reveals the opposite: waking up “a better person” isn’t about a breakthrough moment, it’s about relentless accumulation. The ambition is scaled to the size of a morning, which makes it feel doable, then punishing, then inevitable.
The phrasing is also tellingly internal. Poitier doesn’t say “more successful” or “more famous.” He sets the metric at character, not career. That choice reads like a rebuttal to an industry that measures worth in applause and box office, and to a country that often demanded Black artists be exemplary just to be tolerated. For Poitier, “better” carries moral weight: discipline, restraint, patience, dignity. It hints at the tightrope he walked as a pioneering Black leading man, where every public misstep could be amplified into a referendum on more than himself.
The subtext is responsibility without self-mythology. He’s not asking for sainthood, only for progress between bedtime and breakfast. That temporal framing is crucial: it turns ethics into a habit, not a sermon, and suggests that identity is something you practice, not something you declare. The line lands because it’s both tender and unsentimental: a gentle goal with steel inside it.
The phrasing is also tellingly internal. Poitier doesn’t say “more successful” or “more famous.” He sets the metric at character, not career. That choice reads like a rebuttal to an industry that measures worth in applause and box office, and to a country that often demanded Black artists be exemplary just to be tolerated. For Poitier, “better” carries moral weight: discipline, restraint, patience, dignity. It hints at the tightrope he walked as a pioneering Black leading man, where every public misstep could be amplified into a referendum on more than himself.
The subtext is responsibility without self-mythology. He’s not asking for sainthood, only for progress between bedtime and breakfast. That temporal framing is crucial: it turns ethics into a habit, not a sermon, and suggests that identity is something you practice, not something you declare. The line lands because it’s both tender and unsentimental: a gentle goal with steel inside it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Improvement |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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