Steve Carell quotes: downloading Michael Scott’s mind.
“The only time I set the bar low is for limbo.”
“You’ll never know unless you try.”
“Everyone said to Vincent van Gogh, ‘You can’t be a great painter, you only have one ear.’ And you know what he said? ‘I can’t hear you.'”
“If you are making choices to prove something to someone I don’t feel like that benefits anyone.”
“An office is for not dying. An office is a place to live life to the fullest, to the max, to… an office is a place where dreams come true.”
“Everyone is flawed and everyone makes mistakes and is culpable.”
“It’s okay to fail, it’s okay to make mistakes. People do their best work when they are not hindered by convention.”
“Even the most self-confident people, at one point of their lives, felt like outsiders or felt like they weren’t being heard or seen or witnessed in some way.”
“The ability to compromise and having the ability to laugh at ourselves is huge and works well for me.”
“In real life, everyone’s been to funerals that have laughter and have joy, right? Even within the darkest moments, there are brief glimpses of brightness and light. That’s how human beings cope with the dark times. You have to try and get yourself through it somehow.”
“Your brain, like your tongue, is a muscle. Practicing thinking by yourself really helps develop your brain, which you need throughout your day. I like to practice my thinking in a darkened room, alone.”
“A healthy body means a healthy mind. You get your heart rate up, and you get the blood flowing through your body to your brain. Look at Albert Einstein. He rode a bicycle. He was also an early student of Jazzercise. You never saw Einstein lift his shirt, but he had a six-pack under there.”
“Everyone always wants new things. Everybody likes new inventions, new technology. People will never be replaced by machines. In the end, life and business are about human connections. And computers are about trying to murder you in a lake. And to me the choice is easy.”
“There are 10 rules of business that you need to know. You have to play to win, but you need to win to play. I’ll give you the other nine after lunch.”
“Nothing to me feels as good as laughing incredibly hard.”
“Being a lawyer just sounded good to me. Kind of like how being a doctor or being an astrophysicist or a microbiologist sounds good. But it took a complete turn when I was filling out my law school application. I couldn’t answer the essay question, which was, ‘Why do you want to be an attorney?’ I had absolutely no idea. Uh, to make a lot of money and sue people? To be hated based solely on my job title? I couldn’t come up with one good reason. That ended my law career rather quickly.”
“In my wildest dreams I never thought… well, I never thought I’d work.”
“I guess I’ve been working so hard, I forgot what it’s like to be hardly working.”
“I had, like, two goals in my career. One was to try to get into Second City [an improv comedy spot]. When I moved to Chicago, my goal was to try to work at Second City. And beyond that, my goal was to make enough money as an actor to not do anything else but act, not have to go and wait tables again.”
“I’ve thought a lot about success, because it’s very strange to me that I’ve been successful.”
“If I’d had a great level of success early on, who knows how I would have responded. I might have been a complete jerk. But having success that much later meant I was far more grounded when it came. The last few years of my life have just been surreal and after a lifetime of disappointment and heartache and rejection, I still don’t believe this is all actually happening. I’m extremely grateful for my success. I just never expect it to last and my motto, if I have one, is just put your head down and do the job.”
“I don’t want to, I don’t plan my career based on what I want people to believe I’m capable of doing. So I just take things that I think might be good or might be fun to do or might ultimately entertain.”
“I’ll do whatever I can do to remain employed. I’m just not precious about doing comedy or doing drama. I never want to do something in order to prove to other people what I can do.”
“Reading a book, watching a movie, going to a play, it’s transporting, and very, very exciting. And to be a part of that, creating things with your imagination, whoa.”
“If we were meant to read for enjoyment, would God have created television? Read as it was intended: for exercise. The more you read, the more you expand your—what’s the word I’m looking for?—your stockpile of words. You must have a stockpile of words that you can pass along to your children for their stockpile.”
“For me, at least, all of my career goals, all of my focus, everything just shifted and the importance was my children, and that’s where all the joy came from as well.”
“Being a dad changed me. That instantly became the most important thing I did and will ever do. It gave context to every other part of my life, and I think I’m a good dad. I’m sure I’ve made mistakes, but I’m trying my best.”
“I would like for my kids to at least have some familiarity with who I am. ‘It’s the man from TV!'”
“My job doesn’t define my kids in any way. When we go to places, it’s about them and it’s about us as a family. I think they’re proud of me, but I’m just dad.”
“Don’t underestimate your kids. Don’t be condescending, because they’re children but they’re not stupid.”
“Children are very smart, in their own stupid way. A child’s brain is like a sponge, and you know how smart sponges are.”
“As a parent, all you want is for your kids to be safe but you don’t want to be overprotective and so you know that at some stage, they’re going to make their own mistakes and get hurt emotionally when all you want to do is protect them from that.”
“You’re doing your kids a disservice if they do get everything they want because that’s not the way life’s going to go, and I think kids have to have some reality.”
“Instead of telling our young people to plan ahead, we should tell them to plan to be surprised.”
“Everybody should be normal. Everybody should be nice. I think they go hand in hand, and that to me is the default setting.”
“For the better part of my adult life, I proudly avoided nerd/nimrod/goober status. I was always just cool enough.”
“Maybe the coolest people are the ones who don’t care about being cool. Maybe I will start a new trend. Perhaps I’m so out, I’m in. Nope; that’s a lie. I’ve just given up trying, and I am content in my failure.”
“The better the person you’re with, the better you’re going to be because they’re giving you so much more.”
“Would I rather be feared or loved? Easy. Both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.”
“I’ve waited my entire life to be busy. Whenever I hear actors complain about being busy, I think, ‘shut up.’ Because you do, you wait to be successful or to be able to work.”
“I have a helluva lot more money than I used to! That’s the only perceivable difference. I will definitely be able to send my kids to college now, which was a question before.”
“I bought a Porsche. That was as crazy as I get. I thought, ‘Boy, I’m that middle-aged guy now, with the midlife crisis car, the guy I used to laugh at when I was younger.’ Shortly after I bought it, I felt embarrassed, but I drive it every day.”
“It’s not like I’m a wallflower. I think I’m fairly average. I don’t stand out. I don’t attempt to stand out in any way. I’m not out there. I’m not somebody who’s constantly entertaining. I’m not the life of the party. But on the other hand, I am at the party.”
“I dreamt of being able to make a living doing something that I love. And that really does make me happy and is fun.”
“I can’t imagine it getting any better than this right now.”
“You all took a life here today. The life of the party.”
“We are all facing the end one day or another. I say, live a good and prosperous life, make sure your choices count, make them count.”
Related: John Malkovich quotes.
