And make sure to read these and .
1. “I think it’s better to feel good than to look good.”
2. “A hero is someone who voluntarily walks into the unknown.”
3. “Being kind always works.”
4. “May you live as long as you want and not want as long as you live.”
5. “If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great.”
6. “A villain and a coward can choose to be a hero, but they’ve got to make that choice.”
7. “Human beings do things for a reason, even if sometimes it’s the wrong reason.”
8. “There’s millions of survivors out there. Make it one million and one.”
9. “Never give up because you never know what the tide will bring in the next day.”
10. “Everybody has something that chews them up, and for me, that thing was always loneliness. The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are.”
11. “From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon. It’s not a miracle, we just decided to go.”
12. “I try to do what I call the three E’s—educate, entertain, and enlighten.”
13. “Believing is seeing and seeing is believing.”
14. “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.”
15. “You can always try to do something. Keep moving forward. Keep trying stuff.”
Related:
16. “Even the simplest choice can make a jaw-dropping difference in our world.”
17. “I think 80% of the population are really great, caring people who will help you and tell you the truth. That’s just the way it is. And I think 20% of the population are crooks and liars. It’s just a fact.”
18. “If I stopped having passion, I’d be done.”
19. “I will entertain anything, it doesn’t matter. You know, it’s not obviously about the price, it’s not about who, it’s kind of about when and what. It’s material, that’s all.”
20. “I’m not a smart man, but I know what love is.”
21. “The only way you can truly control how you are seen is by being honest all the time.”
22. “But I also think all of the great stories in literature deal with loneliness. Sometimes, it’s by way of heartbreak. Sometimes, it’s by way of injustice. Sometimes, it’s by way of fate. There’s an infinite number of ways to examine it.”
23. “Show up on time. Know your lines. Have an idea of what to do in the scene. the rest will take care of itself.”
24. “Actors with political views are a dime a dozen.”
25. “Every job requires a certain riding of a horse.”
26. “I don’t cause riots, but I do cause confusion. People freeze when they spot me.”
27.“My job has always been to hold a mirror up to nature.”
28. “I understand the concept of optimism. But I think what you get is a lack of cynicism.”
29. “I would not want to live in a country that would have me as a leader in any sort of political bent.”
30. “It’s going to take a while, but if we take care of each other, help where we can, and give up some comforts—this, too, shall pass. We can figure this out.”
31. “I try not to lie to people—the only way to control the way you’re perceived is to tell the truth.”
32. “We are all God’s animated cartoons.”
33. “You don’t necessarily go in to talk to the person to try to find some secret key to the lock.”
34. “College isn’t necessary for everybody and it’s only from what you put into it what you go there for.”
35. “It’s difficult to say no sometimes. I often hear, ‘They’ll really take care of you,’ or ‘Someone else is going to take the role if you don’t play it.’ Some of the best advice I ever received was to always ask myself, ‘Am I going to kill myself if somebody else takes this role? The answer is almost always. ‘No.’”
36. “It’s just as hard staying happily married as it is doing movies.”
37. “My work is really a blast. When it stops being a blast, then it ain’t no fun no more!”
38. “Let’s not pretend there isn’t a huge industry driven by the choices made by editors and writers who decide what a story is.”
39. “Without question, we make choices—and those choices have consequences. So can you control your own destiny? To a degree, certainly. Must you have faith in serendipity? Without question, you’d better. Otherwise you’re foolish.”
40. “In your mid-30s, it’s time to start playing guys of compromise. And as you get older, men of bitter compromise.”
41. “If things were easy to find, they wouldn’t be worth finding.”
42. “You have to adhere to a philosophy that life unexamined is not worth living, because otherwise, you’re just living from day to day and you don’t have any real sense of yourself or where you are.”
43. “You cannot look up at the night sky on the planet Earth and not wonder what it’s like to be up there amongst the stars. And I always look up at the moon and see it as the single most romantic place within the cosmos.”
44. “The power of the individual is as powerful as the universe is infinite.”
45. “I love what I do for a living, it’s the greatest job in the world, but you have to survive an awful lot of attention that you don’t truly deserve and you have to live up to your professional responsibilities and I’m always trying to balance that with what is really important.”
46. “Shake it off and move on.”
47. “Mama always said dying was a part of life. I sure wish it wasn’t.”
48. “If you don’t entertain, no one will show up. But you also have to educate, because people want to discover specific things about a world unlike their own—whether it’s how hard it is to go to the moon or how scary it is to be on Omaha Beach.”
49. “Dear God, thank you for my life. I forgot how big and wonderful it is.”
50. “There’s no substitute for a great love who says, ‘No matter what’s wrong with you, you’re welcome at this table.’”
51. “There’s such an advantage to being involved in the day-to-day details of each other’s lives. It’s a marvelous fabric to exist in.”
52. “Eating everything you want is not that much fun. When you live a life with no boundaries, there’s less joy. If you can eat anything you want to, what’s the fun in eating anything you want to?”
53. “You learn more from getting your butt kicked than getting it kissed.”
54. “Help, and you will make a huge impact in the life of the street, the town, the country and our planet. If only one out of four of each one hundred of you choose to help on any given day, in any given cause, incredible things will happen in the world you live in.”
55. “If you can feel like a good man in your 40s, you can feel like a better man in your 50s, a Superman in your 60s, and maybe a Spider-Man in your 70s.”
56. “There is something basic about protecting land by taking it off the market. People should be able to enjoy where they live while at the same time protect the plants and animals around them.”
57. “As long as you are an individual, you can convince yourself that in order to move forward as best you can you have to be optimistic, you can be described as ‘one of the faithful,’ one of those people who can say, ‘Well, look, something’s going to happen! Let’s just keep trying. Let’s not give up.’”
58. “But the battles against loneliness that I fought when I was 16 are very different from those I fought when I was 27, and those are very different from the ones I fight at 44.”
59. “Humans are, by naturem too complicated to be understood fully. So, we can choose either to approach our fellow human beings with suspicion or to approach them with an open mind, a dash of optimism, and a great deal of candor.”
60. “We are still in the position of waking up and having a choice. Do I make the world better today somehow, or do I not bother?”
61. “If they could offer up a way to go to the moon that wouldn’t kill you, I’d sign up.”
62. “In the creative process, you come to loggerheads and you just have to keep the process moving forward, even if that requires jumping on a plane and flying to London. It’s a good thing, it’s fun, otherwise it would be too much work.”
63. “Help publicly. Help privately. Help make sense where sense has gone missing. Help science to solve and faith to soothe. Help, and you will abolish apathy—the void that is so quickly filled by ignorance and evil.”
64. “If you’re funny, if there’s something that makes you laugh, then every day’s going to be okay.”
65. “It’s not a mid-life crisis. It’s a mid-life disaster. A mid-life crisis is when you wake up with everything and you go, ‘I have everything but I’m still unhappy.’”
66. “There’s a difference between solitude and loneliness. I can understand the concept of being a monk for a while.”
67. “Truth is, I’ll never know all there is to know about you just as you will never know all there is to know about me. Humans are by nature too complicated to be understood fully. So, we can choose either to approach our fellow human beings with suspicion or to approach them with an open mind, a dash of optimism and a great deal of candour.”
68. “I’ve made over 20 movies, and 5 of them are good.”
69. “At the end of the day, it’s got to be a good movie, it’s got to be a funny movie, and it’s got to make people think, ‘Hey, I couldn’t have spent my time any better.’”
70. “As an actor, I am always waiting for my luck to run out.”
71. “There isn’t any great mystery about me. What I do is glamorous and has an awful lot of white-hot attention placed on it. But the actual work requires the same discipline and passion as any job you love doing, be it as a very good pipe fitter or a highly creative artist.”
72. “There was a period of time in Los Angeles when I wondered if I was just going to lose everything.”
73. “If you have to have a job in this world, a high-priced movie star is a pretty good gig.”
74. “There’s a small percentage of people who can act. There’s a small percentage who get to do this for a living. There’s a swath of the population that are able to keep a story in their head and fight all the battles against self-consciousness and the surreal unnaturalness of acting in a movie. The technical aspects you can learn fairly quickly.”
75. “But television, when I was doing it, was all about scoring. You had to make these jokes bang, do whatever you could to make the material really pop. And if it didn’t, there was something wrong with the material, or with you.”
76. “For some people, I will be Forrest Gump for the rest of my life. But that’s okay, that’s a good thing.”
77. “’Forrest Gump’ was great, it was fabulous. It lasted much longer than anybody thought, and brought me a degree of attention that no human being on the face of the planet deserves.”
78. “If I was to direct Ron Howard, I guarantee you, I would put him through a living hell every day. I would demand so much of him. We wouldn’t quit until he leaves the set crying. Weeping! Spent!”
79. “I’ve made quite a number of movies like Castaway and a few others where I’m the only guy in the movie and the only place to be is right next to the camera in costume ready to go in order to get it. The years, and more specifically probably the four months prior to beginning shooting, is where the big preparation is that the director does because I knew we were going to get on the set. And the good news is, if you’re the boss, if it ain’t good, you don’t use it. You just cut it out.”
80. “My TV show has been cancelled. Nothing else had gone anywhere. Some alliances I had made petered out and nothing came of them and I was looking at a long, long year ahead of me in which there was no work on the horizon, the phone wasn’t ringing. I had two kids, one of them a brand-new baby, and I didn’t know if I would be able to keep my house.”
81. “Prior to Saving Private Ryan, I never worked with men. I was always working with some babe, and it was always about , and it just got turned around. I’m not looking for any particular kind of story. I wait until it comes across my desk.”
82. “When I was 21 years old, I had a job playing Santa Claus in a shopping center in Sacramento. I was rail-thin, so it’s not like I was a traditional Santa Claus even then. I had a square stomach that was the shape of the sofa cushion that I had stuffed into my pants.”
83. “Movie-making is telling a story with the best technology at your disposal.”
84. “If you look at romantic comedies as pieces of commerce, the audience is looking for wish fulfillment.”
85. “Directing is a constant test of your communicative powers. You’re constantly trying to explain to people your vision of what you want and steer these tiny little details into a cohesive thing.”
86. “Larger-than-life characters make up about .01% of the world’s population.”
87. “Audiences crave something they’ve never seen before. That’s what they want. They want to be dazzled. They want to go in either to have their blown out of the water, or have no expectations and are dazzled by the decisions that we made.”
88. “The nature of the movies is different than it was five years ago, and they’re all driven by the possibilities of CGI, which means you can make anything happen on screen that you can possibly desire.”
89. “The truth is that everyone pays attention to who’s number one at the box office. And none of it matters because the only thing that really exists is the connection the audience has with a movie.”
90. “An animatic is a process where every voice and every sound effect is added to rough animated drawings and it lasts exactly as long as the final movie. So you actually get to go into a screening room with the rest of the cast and you get to see it all at the same time.”
91. “If there are nine guys auditioning and they’re all gorgeous, I have an advantage, because gorgeous guys are a dime a dozen. But if they need someone else—like a goofy guy with bad hair who is just okay—then that’s me. And finally, the other 2% who audition are geniuses that I could never touch.”
92. “’Larry Crowne’ is about as bummed out a human being as one can be when he loses his job. What he is able to enjoy is something that may not be available to everybody. But it’s about the value of being willing to get and willing to give good advice.”
93. “Motion pictures are just beginning to live up to their true potential of being an immersive experience—going from beyond black and white flickering images to fully immersive 3D color high-definition. You don’t even know where the real world starts and the fake world begins. And yet, none of that’s going to matter unless the story and the emotions that they allow us to become invested in are something that we can recognize. Pixar is able to do this in ways that almost defies speculation.”
94. “Now, learning how to make a movie is something you can figure out in about an afternoon. The physics of it, the marks, the lights, etc. What’s hard to do is to suspend your own feelings of self consciousness. The natural actors can do that—they can become part of a characterization and learn how to maintain it.”
95. “Repertory theater is all about being part of the whole, one of the many colors in this vast palette.”
96. “The filmmakers aren’t running the studios anymore. Sometimes people who like films are making them, but by and large, they have to go report quarterly earnings and all that stuff. The competition is so huge that it’s very hard to get people to show up to see any movie in the theater, much less an original one that isn’t a version of something else they saw.”
97. “The nature of motion capture is only going to work for certain films. It’s not going to put any other type of movies out of business.”
98. “That’s what’s nice about directing a film and having it done. There’s nothing more I can do about it. It’s done. That’s it. All I can do is let it go and hope that people are kind to it.”
99. “It’s always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It’s hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.”
100. “Reading a script is usually as exciting as reading a boilerplate legal document, so when you read one that makes you feel as if you’re seeing the movie, you know it’s something different.”
101.“And then it was like, wait, you can go to college and study theater? And act in plays? This is almost a racket, you know. And then when the opportunity came along to do it professionally, I thought I’d won the lottery.”
102. “The reason most of us go to the movies is to be involved in someone else’s moral dilemma.”
103. “Acting still rings my bell as much as it did in high school. Plus, I can now indulge my interests as a producer as well. My work is more fun than fun but, best of all, it’s still very scary. You are always walking some kind of high wire.”
104. “As a young man, even if I was going to see a play or a film by myself, I didn’t feel like I was alone. There was something that was unfolding up there that brought me into it. And I recognized that. For those two hours, it made me feel like I belonged to something really good.”
105. “I always wanted to play Lestrade of Scotland Yard ’cause he’s a buffoon that gets to wear a uniform. I thought that would be fun.”
106. “I do not want to admit to the world that I can be a bad person. It is just that I don’t want anyone to have false expectations. Moviemaking is a harsh, volatile business, and unless you can be ruthless, too, there’s a good chance that you are going to disappear off the scene pretty quickly.”
107. “The most accurate representation of how I feel is that I’m incredibly lucky to be working in this structure where people get paid millions to read the news on TV. And, yes, it is insane. And there is nothing I can say beyond acknowledging my immense good fortune, and being aware that I’m blessed, and aware that it isn’t going to last forever.”
108. “I would like to think I’ve reflected the audience’s lives somehow, though it’s in this big, false, glamorous arena of movies. I hope people see themselves somehow on the screen.”
109. “It is meant to make people think, ‘How in the world did we do that?,’ and isn’t it a marvelous thing that we did?”
110. “The Pixar people continuously amaze me. They come up with something that actually looks as though it takes place in this happy, real-world. Every plot line is not just plausible, but oddly authentic. The stories are full of adventure, humor and love. The characters are written with great human dimension. I don’t know how they do it but they astound me.”
111. “There’s this misconception that the Navy is this cruise ship, and you get to go out and sail around, and every now and then, you have to swab the deck. But, no, it is a very impressive group of young people that live at sea, in this place that’s very uncomfortable. They exude a pride that is well-deserved.”
112. “Again and again, we’re searching for that person who’s a magic key for us, makes us feel connected, secure, part of something bigger than ourselves. Without it, the world ain’t any fun.”
113. “Growing up in northern California has had a big influence on my love and respect for the . When I lived in Oakland, we would think nothing of driving to Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz one day and then driving to the foothills of the Sierras the next day.”
114. “I am who I am, and I think I have a good nature, by and large. But if someone takes advantage of that good nature, well then, you know, I’m not that nice a guy.”
115. “And I’m not apolitical. I’m very specific in my politics. But a lot of the time it’s nobody’s business unless you’re over at my house having dinner.”
116. “I have gone through so many examinations of what a hero is, between the World War II stuff and the astronaut stuff.”
117. “I have high blood sugars, and Type 2 diabetes is not going to kill me. But I just have to eat right, and exercise, and lose weight, and watch what I eat, and I will be fine for the rest of my life.”
118. “E-mail is far more convenient than the telephone, as far as I’m concerned. I would throw my phone away if I could get away with it.”
119. “But look, I was born in 1956, the peak year for births in US history. I think I’m very representative of many of the thought processes my generation have been through and, by and large, people of my age have had their imprint planted on the consciousness of western society for a long time.”
120. “Even if a story has nothing to do with my life, if I can recognise something of myself in the character and think, ‘Oh yeah, that’s what I’d do. Yeah, that’s what I look for.’”
121. “It just so happens that my body type and my lifestyle gives me a preclusion for high blood sugars.”
122. “I did a ‘Love Boat!’ And based on my trip on the ‘Love Boat,’ I said, ‘I’d just as soon not do ‘Fantasy Island.’”
123. “My favorite traditional Christmas movie that I like to watch is All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s just not December without that movie in my house.”
124. “I think I’m lucky that I had kids as spread out as I did, ’cause my , my oldest, was born when I was 21. And my youngest is 15 now. He was born when I was 40, you know?”
125. “I want to have a good time myself. I don’t want to dread going to work no matter what the gig is. I think, selfishly, I will make sure that I have a good time, how about that?”
126. “In the 1998 Oscars, I found myself in the bathroom in a stall, next to Tom Selleck. So I leaned over and I said ‘looks like we’re a couple of peeing Toms. His angry silence is something I’ll never forget.”
127. “My doctor said, ‘If you can weigh what you weighed in high school, you’ll essentially be healthy and not have Type 2 diabetes.’ Well, I’m gonna have Type 2 diabetes, because there is no way I can weigh as much as I did in high school.”
128. “How about coffee, drinks, dinner, a movie or as long as we both shall live?”
129. “All my life I’ve been waiting for someone, and when I find her, she’s, she’s a fish.”
130. “Are you crying? Are you crying? There’s no crying! There’s no crying in baseball!”
131. “I know what I have to do now. I gotta keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?”
132. “I guess sometimes the past just catches up with you, whether you want it to or not.”
133. “The Godfather is the I-ching. The Godfather is the sum of all wisdom. The Godfather is the answer to any question. What should I pack for my summer vacation? “
134. “Reach for the sky!”
135. “You never know what events are to transpire to get you home.”
136. “It’s that every now and again—not often, but occasionally—you get to be a part of justice being done. That really is quite a thrill when that happens.”
137. ” It was like coming home, only to no home I’d ever known. I was just taking her hand to help her out of a car, and I knew. It was like magic.”
138. “Tweeting is like sending out cool telegrams to your friends once a week.”
139. “My wife keeps on telling me my worst fault is that I keep things to myself and appear relaxed. But I am really in a room in my own head and not hearing a thing anyone is saying.”
140. “All the kids are gone. It’s the greatest thing that has ever happened to Mr. and Mrs. Tom Hanks. I’ll tell you that right now. Second greatest after having the kids in the first place. When they go, holy smoke, it’s like you’re dating again. It’s fantastic. Also, we were doing an awful lot of work.”
141. “By and large, the making of motion pictures is all about, ‘Let’s ratchet it up.’ And I always think, ‘We don’t need to ratchet this up.’ If you do, don’t call it ‘Captain Phillips’ or ‘The Maersk Alabama.’ Call it something else, and then you have carte blanche to do anything, down to sea serpents and aliens.”
142. “The desert, when the sun comes up, couldn’t tell where heaven stopped and the Earth began.”
143. “The same way that I know that I’ll never do a movie as good or as celebrated as ‘Forrest Gump,’ I know that I’ll never do a movie as bad as ‘Bonfire of the Vanities.’”
144. “I must say that I do wrestle with the amount of money I make, but at the end of the day what am I gonna say? I took less money so Rupert Murdoch could have more?”
145. “I went to college because I didn’t have anywhere else to go and it was a fabulous hang. And while I was there I was exposed to this world that I didn’t know was possible.”
146. “I’m not interested in doing something edgy with a capital E just so everyone knows, ‘Oh, okay, now he’s showing us he can do edgy.’”
147. “It was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, they meant we were supposed to be together and I knew it.”
148. “I’ve talked to a number of actors who have gained weight for roles, and just the sheer physical toll it puts on one’s knees and shoulders—no one wants to do it again. I’m 57 and I don’t think I’m going to take on any job or go on vacation again and see to it that I can gain 30 pounds.”
149. “No journalist has ever been in my house and no photographs have ever been taken of where I live. I don’t parade my family out for display, which is the way it will stay.”
