Michael J. Fox quotes: Marty McFly on money, making the most of a bad hand, happiness, family, and more.
“Look at the choices you have, not the choices that have been taken away from you. In them, there are whole worlds of strength and new ways to look at things.”
“If you allow for the possibilities of something better, you move toward it instinctively.”
“Don’t let an opportunity pass you by.”
“Our challenges don’t define us, our actions do.”
“The only thing worse than an opportunity you don’t deserve is blowing an opportunity.”
“A creative mess is better than idle tidiness.”
“If you want to be an agent of change, it starts with you and what you’re made of.”
“Everything is cause and effect. If you don’t move, nothing will move with you, and nothing will move toward you.”
“If you don’t take the time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”
“I like to encourage people to realize that any action is a good action if it’s proactive and there is positive intent behind it.”
“Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there’s got to be a way through it.”
“There’s always failure. And there’s always disappointment. And there’s always loss. But the secret is learning from the loss, and realizing that none of those holes are vacuums.”
“You suffer the blow, but you capitalize on the opportunity left in its wake.”
“If you fixate on the worst-case scenario and it actually happens, you’ve lived it twice.”
“One’s dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but cannot be taken away unless it is surrendered.”
“Do the right thing, and then do the next right thing, and that will lead you to the next right thing after that.”
“Whatever the situation, just take it for what it is. You don’t have to make it worse or better than it is. It just is what it is. Always deal with the honesty, the truth of what something is, and then you’ve got all kinds of choices.”
“If you have one foot in yesterday and one foot in tomorrow, you’re pissing all over today.”
“It’s all about control. Control is illusory. No matter what university you go to, no matter what degree you hold, if your goal is to become master of your own destiny, you have more to learn.”
“There are no moments you have frozen in amber. It’s moving, it’s changing, so appreciate what’s good about right now and be ready for what’s next.”
“I urge you to be challenged and inspired by what you do not know.”
“Discipline is just doing the same thing the right way whether anyone’s watching or not.”
“If you don’t have someone calling you on your sh*t, you’re lost.”
“Acceptance is the key to everything.”
“Pay attention to what’s happening around you. Read the book before you see the movie. Remember, though you, alone, are responsible for your own happiness, it’s still okay to feel responsible for someone else’s. Live to learn.”
“It may seem hard to believe, but it’s catastrophe that offers the most promise for an even richer life. This is the gateway to the good stuff. In other words, you never truly know which way the wind is blowing until the sh*t hits the fan.”
“I truly believe that we have infinite levels of power that we don’t even know are available to us.”
“The more I expect, the more unhappy I am going to be. The more I accept, the more serene I am.”
“If you’re lucky, in some point in the future when you’re in need of guidance or perhaps moral support, you may cross paths with a suitable mentor. Even luckier, you’ll realize you had one in your life all along and you’ll gain a new appreciation for how you benefited from that relationship. The luckiest relationship of all, of course, is a combination of the two. You’ve had help all along, and as the path widens or narrows, whatever the case may be, new and powerful influences will enter your life and aid your progress. In my experience, a mentor doesn’t necessarily tell you what to do, but more importantly: tells you what they did or might do, then trusts you to draw your own conclusions and act accordingly. If you succeed, they’ll take one step back and if you fail, they’ll take one step closer. Whatever it is they teach you, pass it on.”
“I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence I can reach for; perfection is God’s business.”
“When life takes away, something of greater value is always given in return.”
“Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it saved my ass.”
“Constant curiosity leads to happiness: I wake up curious every day and every day I’m surprised by something. And if I can just recognize that surprise every day and say, ‘Oh, that’s a new thing, that’s a new gift that I got today that I didn’t even know about yesterday,’ it keeps me going. It keeps me more than going. It keeps me enthusiastic and grateful!”
“When something enters your life that is so big and so non-negotiable as catastrophic illness, you either go in denial for a while or ultimately you accept it and you make space for it. And in making space for it, you illuminate a lot of things that you normally don’t have room for – you simply just look at the world differently.”
“I have no choice about whether or not I have Parkinson’s. I have nothing but choices about how I react to it. In those choices, there’s freedom to do a lot of things in areas that I wouldn’t have otherwise found myself in.”
“After all that I’d been through, after all that I’d learned and all that I’d been given, I was going to do what I had been doing every day for the last few years now: just show up and do the best that I could do with whatever lay in front of me.”
“When prescribing one of the drugs I take, my doctor warned me of a common side effect: exaggerated, intensely vivid dreams. To be honest, I’ve never really noticed the difference. I’ve always dreamt big.”
“Optimism is a cure for many things.”
“I don’t feel a yearning or a sense of missed opportunities. I don’t have many regrets. So that’s a nice feeling. To have no regrets and still have enough sense of adventure to take on risk.”
“Life is what you put into it and how much you take out of it. You put in more than is expected, and you take out less than you want.”
“By 21, I was earning six figures a week. By 23, I had a Ferrari. It was nuts.”
“I owned a Ferrari, a Range Rover, a Mercedes 560SL convertible, a Jeep Cherokee and a Nissan 300ZX. I can’t remember the intricate decision tree I had to climb in order to determine which one to drive to work on any given day – it probably had something to do with the weather, or which car had more gas in the tank, or upholstery that best matched whatever shirt I happened to throw on that morning.”
“I can’t be smug, because I know that you can lose anything at any point. And I can’t be angry, because I haven’t lost it.”
“Happiness is a decision.”
“I really love being alive. I love my family and my work. I love the opportunity I have to do things. That’s what happiness is.”
“Family is not an important thing. It’s everything.”
“Never give up.”
Also see George Clooney quotes.
