Tom Hanks quotes: the actor who seems to only act in mega-movies learns us.
“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.”
“… childish, selfish, immature – that’s right, I am. But do you know how much money I make for thinking this way?”
“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?”
“As long as you as an individual 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.'”
“Never give up because you never know what the tide will bring in the next day.”
“You can always try to do something. Keep moving forward. Keep trying stuff.”
“Believing is seeing and seeing is believing.”
“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?”
“You learn more from getting your butt kicked than getting it kissed.”
“Some people are cowards. I think by and large a third of people are villains, a third are cowards, and a third are heroes. Now, a villain and a coward can choose to be a hero, but they’ve got to make that choice.”
“Even the simplest choice can make a jaw-dropping difference in our world.”
“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.”
“The sharp terror of a loss of confidence in ourselves… you think, ‘How did I get here and how am I going to continue this and when are they going to discover I am, in fact, a fraud and take everything away from me?’ It’s a high wire act that we all walk. ‘If I can’t do it then that means I am going to have to fake it.'”
“Look, if I stopped having passion, I’d be done. The truth is I’ll probably be able to work from now on. Whether it’s at the level I’m doing it at now is beside the point, because my work is really a blast. When it stops being a blast, then it ain’t no fun no more.”
“If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great.”
“If things were easy to find, they wouldn’t be worth finding.”
“A hero is somebody who voluntarily walks into the unknown.”
“I think it’s better to feel good than to look good.”
“If you have to have a job in this world, a high-priced movie star is a pretty good gig.”
“May you live as long as you want and not want as long as you live.”
“Every job requires a certain riding of a horse.”
“Human beings do things for a reason, even if sometimes it’s the wrong reason.”
“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.”
“I know what I have to do now, I’ve got to keep breathing because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?”
“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.”
“I went to college because I didn’t have anywhere else to go and it was a fabulous thing. And while I was there I was exposed to this world that I didn’t know was possible.”
“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.”
“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 [an Australian businessman] could have more?'”
“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 candor.”
“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.”
“The only way you can truly control how you are seen is by being honest all the time.”
“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?”
“If you’re funny, if there’s something that makes you laugh, then every day’s going to be okay.”
“There’s millions of survivors out there – make it one million and one.”
“I don’t cause riots, but I do cause confusion. People freeze when they spot me.”
“For some people, I will be Forrest Gump for the rest of my life. But that’s okay; that’s a good thing.”
“My mama always said, ‘Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.'”
