George Lucas quotes: Sir Star Wars walks us through his life lessons.
“If you want to be successful in a particular field of endeavor, I think perseverance is one of the key qualities.”
“Working hard is very important. You’re not going to get anywhere without working extremely hard.”
“Always remember, your focus determines your reality.”
“We are all living in cages with the door wide open.”
“Follow your bliss. Do the thing where you sit down at eight a.m. and then you realize you’re hungry and you look up and it’s 10 p.m. If you can find something you love that much, it doesn’t matter what you do.”
“Everybody has talent, it’s just a matter of moving around until you’ve discovered what it is.”
“It’s very important not to do what your peers think you should do, not do what your parents think, your teachers, or even your culture. Do what’s inside of you.”
“You have to find something that you love enough to be able to take risks, jump over the hurdles, and break through the brick walls that are always going to be placed in front of you. If you don’t have that kind of feeling for what it is you’re doing, you’ll stop at the first giant hurdle.”
“You simply have to put one foot in front of the other and keep going. Put blinders on and plow right ahead.”
“You must let go of your past and embrace your future and figure out what path you’re going to go down.”
“Train yourself to let go of the things you fear you’ll lose.”
“I haven’t met anybody who hasn’t been able to describe years and years and years of very, very difficult struggle through the whole process of achieving anything whatsoever. And there’s no way to sort of get around that.”
“Success is when you try to achieve your inward vision externally and have it come off the way you see it. Then you feel successful about it; that’s how success is measured.”
“Part of the issue of achievement is to be able to set realistic goals, but that’s one of the hardest things to do because you don’t always know exactly where you’re going, and you shouldn’t.”
“You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.”
“The theme that runs through my movies is the fact that we create barriers for ourselves… because we say, ‘Well, I can’t do that.’ But in the end, you can’t do it unless you can imagine yourself succeeding at it.”
“In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more knowledge lights our way.”
“The secret is not to give up hope. It’s very hard not to because if you’re really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side.”
“It’s okay to lose; just don’t lose the lesson.”
“The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.”
“Mentors have a way of seeing more of our faults than we would like. It’s the only way we grow.”
“You need peers; you need people who are at the same level you are. You never know in life when you’re going to need help, and you never know who you’re going to need it from.”
“A lot of great thinkers – like Einstein and Newton – come up with their best ideas when they’re young because they don’t yet think in the way that the establishment teaches them. Sometimes your lack of knowledge frees your mind to be creative and think in a different way. But you still have to be logical and figure out a practical way to get things done, even though you’re looking at things differently.”
“Heroes come in all sizes, and you don’t have to be a giant hero. You can be a very small hero. It’s just as important to understand that accepting self-responsibility for the things you do, having good manners, caring about other people – these are heroic acts. Everybody has the choice of being a hero or not being a hero every day of their lives.”
“I think as you grow up, you realize you have obligations just in your life – being a citizen, being part of humanity – to help other people, to help your country, to help the world.”
“You can find people who have discovered the fact that it’s really helping people, it’s really being compassionate toward other human beings that makes you happy, that gives you a spiritual fulfillment – a kind of fulfillment that goes way beyond anything you can buy.”
“Someday you’re going to have to learn to separate what seems to be important from what really is important.”
“The one way the world hasn’t changed: teaching is still the most important job.”
“I am dedicating the majority of my wealth to improving education. It is the key to the survival of the human race. We have to plan for our collective future – and the first step begins with the social, emotional, and intellectual tools we provide to our children. As humans, our greatest tool for survival is our ability to think and to adapt – as educators, storytellers, and communicators, our responsibility is to continue to do so.”
“Whatever has happened in my quest for innovation has been part of my quest for immaculate reality.”
“If America is the pursuit of happiness, the best way to pursue happiness is to help other people.”
“Real love is on the inside. It’s somebody you have a common ground with, you share the same values, you share the same interests, you share the same humor, you share all those things that are things that will last you the rest of your life.”
“You can be as rich and famous and powerful as you want to be, and it will not bring you happiness. That’s said over and over and over again. It’s such a cliché that it hardly needs to be said, but people don’t understand that it’s actually true.”
“My success wasn’t based on how I could push down everybody that was around me. My success was based on how much I could lift everybody up.”
“I’ve always just followed my own course, whatever I found the most interesting to me at the moment. I’ve never had a real plan of, ‘I want to get from here to there, and I’ve got to do this.'”
“There wasn’t anything in my life that was going to stop me from making movies.”
“You try to get yourself into a situation where you only have to answer to yourself, where you can ask advice of people and work with your peers and mentors and things to try to do the best job that you can possibly do.”
“I’m extremely grateful that I discovered my passion. I love movies. I love to watch them, I love to make them.”
“I’m here, and every day now is an extra day. I’ve been given an extra day so I’ve got to make the most of it.”
“I regret not the things I have done, only those I have yet to do.”
“It’s in the doing that you prove yourself.”
“May the force be with you.”
