2. “Fatigue, discomfort, discouragement are merely symptoms of effort.”
3. “Don’t be afraid of what you want. This is your time. The barriers are down.”
4. “I once heard a wise man say there are no perfect men, only perfect intentions.”
5. “ is the Honey Boo Boo of rich people.”
6. “Challenge yourself; it’s the only path which leads to growth.”
7. “Don’t be different just for different’s sake. If you see it differently, function that way. Follow your own muse, always.”
8. “If you’re not living on the edge then you’re taking up a little too much space.”
9. “The highest power is the human mind. That’s where God came from and my belief in God is my belief in myself.”
10. “I hate the word homophobia. It’s not a phobia. You are not scared. You are an asshole.”
11. “If you want to see a miracle, be the miracle.”
12. “How are we going to get rid of racism? Stop talking about it!”
13. “I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice.”
14. “Never let pride be your guiding principle. Let your accomplishments speak for you.”
15. “I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.”
16. “How do we change the world? One random act of kindness at a time.”
17. “Did you just call me old? I really prefer the word ‘experienced.’”
18. “As long as you feel like a victim, you are one.”
19. “I am going to stop calling you a white man and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.”
20. “Forgiveness liberates the soul, it removes fear.”
21. “Learning how to be still, to really be still and let life happen—that stillness becomes a radiance.”
22. “In the harshest place on Earth, love finds a way.”
23. “So if I believe in God, and I do, it’s because I think I’m God.”
24. “If your life turns out to be good and you have a tremendous amount of luck in your life, it’s a good thing to turn around and make it work for others.”
25. “All you have to do is believe, then you will see everything.”
26. “I’m making a great effort because sometimes, life is not enjoyable. Sometimes it’s painful, and sometimes it’s stressful, sometimes it’s agonizing, even, so I think once you get around those humps, strive for pleasure and peace.”
27. “Still, it can be more effective to accomplish what you need to accomplish with the minimum effort. Watch . He doesn’t appear to be doing anything. He is so still that you can’t see him working, but you are drawn into his character through his very stillness.”
28. “Well, here’s a scientific question—has anybody ever seen hard evidence? What we get is theories from our earlier prophets. Now, people who think that God invented us think that the Earth can’t be more than 6,000 years old. So I guess it’s a question of belief.”
29. “The public feels that if it’s on the internet and you can access it, you deserve it. You haven’t committed any kind of crime. We may even have to rename piracy. But in any case, we have to confront it.”
30. “And some places you’ve been before are so great that you don’t ever mind going back. Some places you’ve been before you don’t ever want to go back.”
31. “Is listening important? I can’t think of a single walk of life where it wouldn’t be.”
32. “As the mask of falls off the face of humanity, unveiling the grim reality of duality in which everyone is a casualty, no one will be exempt.”
33. “Truth has many shades. It’s not a matter of black and white, but gray.”
34. “Although many, we are one. So in the final analysis, could it be that we are fighting a war that can’t be won? We’re turning everything on the planet into food for humans so we’re cutting down the rainforests, displacing all of the animals, and we’re doing all this to feed humans.”
35. “I was lucky in that when the opportunity came, I was prepared to meet it.”
36. “That’s really just the worst part of life, really. You get bracketed somewhere and the next thing you know people are saying, ‘No. No. That’s not the type. Get me so and so.’ I’m not a type. I’m an actor.”
37. “I know people are saying they like you. I’m not being insulted, or pushed, around or anything. People are coming up because they like me. Nevertheless, I can’t be everybody’s. None of us can. I hate saying no to people.”
38. “The best way to confront or deal with technological innovation is to keep moving technologically.”
39. “You can make anything into a play for the simple reason that the human mind is one of the best writers in the business. So, if you’ve got a writer who’s clever enough to give you enough clues, you will fill out every blank spot in a play, every single one.”
40. “We humans are more concerned with having than with being.”
41. “The trick to any profession is making it look easy.”
42. “You can’t take credit for talent; you can only take credit for using it.”
43. “I always tell my kids if you lay down, people will step over you. But if you keep scrambling, if you keep going, someone will always, always give you a hand. Always. But you gotta keep dancing, you gotta keep your feet moving.”
44. “Your best posture is your next posture.”
45. “If you look back on your life and where you started from, it’s like looking back down a mountain back to the desert floor. It’s like now I can’t believe I had whatever it takes or perceived whatever it took to get here.”
46. “Audiences believe what you believe. It’s . If I believe me, then you’ve got no choice. None at all.”
47. “But I can say that life is good to me—has been and is good. So I think my task is to be good to it. So how do you be good to life? You live it.”
48. “You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you.”
49. “I’ve never had any intimate relationships with a dolphin.”
50. “That’s your job as the actor—to understand the human part of the character, to make it real.”
51. “I like the character roles. Somewhere back there I really came to the conclusion in my mind that the difference between acting and stardom was major.”
52. “I’ve always been a fan of or desired to or responded to variety. I like variety in life, so variety in work is a must.”
53. “Was I always going to be here? No, I was not. I was going to be homeless at one time, a taxi driver, truck driver, or any kind of job that would get me a crust of bread. You never know what’s going to happen.”
54. “Every job’s a challenge. The challenge is to do it and make it look right, like you belong there—wherever that is.”
55. “As you grow in this business, you learn how to do more with less.”
56. “I’ve been living with myself all of my life, so I know all of me. So when I watch me, all I see is me. It’s boring.”
57. “You can’t always translate the words into the meaning.”
58. “One day, very soon, we’ll be asked, ‘What did we do?’ And we will say, ‘We did everything we could.’ We have to, because if we don’t, there won’t be anyone left to ask. We have never faced a crisis this big, that we have never had better ideas to solve. This is our only home. We can choose today to make a world of difference.”
59. “And that if you become a star, people are going to go to see you. If you remain an actor, they’re going to go and see the story you’re in.”
60. “If you dream, you’ve got to dream that it’s going to happen. Remember that. If you dream, you have to imagine that it will actually happen.”
61. “I’m a firm believer that things happen as they should. The universe unfolds just as it’s supposed to.”
62. “The best way to guarantee a loss is to quit.”
63. “I am God. So it’s easy to play him. They say God is in all things. So if God is in me, then I am in God. Therefore, I am God. God does not exist without me.”
64. “Very often, you know, you stop walking because you say, ‘Well, I’m tired of climbing this hill. I’m never going to get to the top.’ And you’re only two steps from the top.”
65. “It’s what I learn from the great actors that I work with—stillness. That’s all and that’s the hardest thing.”
66. “Write something insightful. Say Morgan Freeman said it. Win on the internet.”
67. “My approach to acting is that I am totally intuitive. I read the script and I get it. If I don’t get it, I can’t do it.”
68. “Actors cannot work against each other. It’s totally impossible.”
69. “Is there a movie I think I should have won the Oscar for? Yeah. All of them.”
70. “If I stay at home, I’m not famous. I’m only famous when I’m out in the streets, so I don’t go out on the streets much.”
71. “The better the actor, usually the safer you feel working with.”
72. “I think if you take a job, you owe it as much passion as the job itself demands. And most jobs demand that you be totally committed.”
73. “Finding joy is probably tantamount to finding yourself and being comfortable in your own skin.”
74. “When I was doing theater, I was very successful at believing that I was great—God’s gift to the theater.”
75. “I don’t think that anyone learns anything. Well, I mean, you do always learn something if you have your eyes and ears open. You do learn something from every outing, every time that you go for it. But for me, what actors do is interact and that’s why you have to do that.”
76. “You’re not going to be able to look like anyone else, no matter how hard you try, unless you’re a mimic; then you’re not acting, you’re just mimicking.”
77. “I don’t have anybody telling me what to say. I have people who would suggest, maybe, that I shouldn’t do this, that or the other, but that’s strictly up to me.”
78. “I believe it doesn’t really matter where you work as long as you work. Keep sharpening your teeth.”
79. “Being blind is as simple as closing your eyes. The blind don’t act any different than you or I. You never see a blind person going around saying, ‘I’m blind.’ So if you want to play blind, just and keep them closed and fare thee well.”
80. “If we don’t save the oceans, if we don’t do something about what we’re doing to the oceans, as well as the planet at large, we’re going to be really sorry.”
81. “So we say, ‘Oh, my goodness; we think we’ve found another Earth-like planet.’ We will start trying to figure out how to get there. And I have this strong belief that whatever we think we can do, whatever we can dream, we can do.”
82. “One universe, four forces, billions of galaxies. The precision and complexity of our world is enough to make even the famous cosmologist go just a little bit crazy. How does it all fit together? Is there a single, overarching design to the cosmos? And if we find it, will we glimpse the mind of God?”
83. “It’s sort of well-known that anytime any catastrophe happens anywhere in the world, they can count on the United States for help.”
84. “I am passionate about what is going on with the oceans, mainly because we are for some idiotic reason, really screwing it up. I mean, we’re really killing the ocean. It’s like putting out the sun. Without it, there is no us.”
85. “Nobody is trying to save energy. We’re trying to shift our use of fuel. Forget saving energy; if we get the right kind of energy, there are endless amounts.”
86. “If you live a life of make-believe, your life isn’t worth anything until you do something that does challenge your reality. And to me, sailing the open ocean is a real challenge, because it’s life or death.”
87. “I think you have to be left-brained, to a certain extent, to understand science. I can talk about it, but I can’t do it.”
88. “I believe in helping the planet survive, and that includes reaching out to help some of the disappearing creatures whose habitats we’re destroying. It’s up to us to somehow reverse that trend. I don’t know how we’ll achieve it, but we need to.”
89. “I gravitate towards gravitas.”
90. “The first thing that always pops into my head regarding our president, is that all of the people who are setting up this barrier for him. They just conveniently forget that Barack had a mama, and she was white—very white; American, Kansas, middle of America. There is no argument about who he is, or what he is. America’s first black president hasn’t risen yet. He’s not America’s first black president. He’s America’s first mixed-race president.”
91. “Attacking people with disabilities is the lowest display of power I can think of.”
92. “Insanity is being shit on, beat down, coasting through life in a miserable existence, when you have a caged lion locked inside and a key to release it.”
93. “Never give up the ganja.”
94. “You don’t know how much you appreciate your privacy until you don’t have it.”
95. “It’s just the stupidest law possible. You’re just making criminals out of people who aren’t engaged in criminal activity. And we’re spending zillions of dollars trying to fight a war we can’t win! We could make zillions, just legalize it and tax it like we do liquor. It’s stupid.”
96. “Anyone who spends a significant amount of time with me finds me disagreeable.”
97. “Look at the Tea Partiers who are controlling the Republican Party. Their stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term. What underlines that? Screw the country. We’re going to whatever we do to get this black man, we can, we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here. It is a racist thing.”