Paul Newman quotes: the late actor, race car driver, and doer of good gives us these impressive quotes.
“The best gift you can give yourself is the gift of possibility.”
“The need is great, and so are the opportunities, to make a difference.”
“A lot of people have dreams and never do anything about them. When you have ideas and dreams, you do something about it.”
“Dreams without movement are delusions, escapes, kid’s play. You have to put your feet into your dreams if they’re ever going to be reality. The dreamers we know and love today are the ones who worked the hardest.”
“Study your craft and know who you are and what’s special about you.”
“Show me a good loser and I will show you a loser.”
“I check my pulse and if I can find it, I know I’ve got a chance.”
“I changed my life today. What did you do?”
“You got to have two things to win. You got to have brains and you got to have balls.”
“I’m a great believer in luck and the extraordinary role that plays in all of our lives.”
“I think it’s very desirable to be an individual and a free thinker.”
“Men experience many passions in a lifetime. One passion drives away the one before it.”
“A dollar won is twice as sweet as a dollar earned.”
“Winning isn’t everything. It’s just all there is.”
“A man can only be judged by his actions, and not by his good intentions or his beliefs.”
“People stay married because they want to, not because the doors are locked.”
“We are such spendthrifts with our lives, the trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”
“If you’re playing a poker game and you look around the table and can’t tell who the sucker is? It’s you.”
“What could be better than to hold your hand out to people less fortunate than you are?”
“When you see the right thing to do, you’d better do it.”
“Just because you come up against a wall doesn’t mean you quit. I think, little by little, people are beginning to understand there’s a lot of pork out there, in almost every area.”
“Fill the moment and find variety.”
“Necessity is the motherf*cker of invention.”
“We’re successful because we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”
“If you don’t believe the legend, then you can’t really take yourself seriously. And if you don’t take yourself seriously, you’ve got a chance. It’s when you take yourself seriously and you begin to believe all this bullsh*t that you can really flounder.”
“It wasn’t as though I really made a commitment to it; there wasn’t anything else around. So I wasn’t driven to become an actor. It just seemed to be the thing that I managed to do best.”
“I wasn’t running toward the theater but running away from the sporting goods store. Of course, now that I’m selling spaghetti sauce (with Newman’s Own), I begin to understand the romance of business – the allure of being the biggest fish in the pond and the juice you get from beating out your competitors.”
“I’m a very competitive person. I always have been. And it’s hard to be competitive about something as amorphous as acting. But you can be competitive on the track, because the rules are very simple and the declaration of the winner is very concise.”
“If you start thinking that’s the single ingredient that makes you successful, it really undermines your sense of your own value. Incidentally, I’m actually someone who laughs a lot. I really am a joker. But if you ask serious questions, you get serious answers.”
“The problem with getting older is you still remember how things used to be.”
“I never used to swear. I never used any kind of foul language. Now, it’s not worth being in the same room with me. And it’s funny, of all the attributes that could have stuck to me, that those were the two that stuck the strongest and the longest. But I don’t take much of it seriously. I really don’t. And that’s all I have to say about that.”
“It’s absolutely amazing that I survived all the booze and smoking and the cars and the career.”
“I have taken roads that I wished I had not traveled on. And I’m traveling on some pretty exciting ones, too. Just hope when you get to that great racetrack in the sky, that the balance will tip slightly into those things that you’d be proud of.”
“Because I just had my first two grandchildren. I want them to have a future filled with opportunity and the best education possible. But not every child is as lucky.”
“We all die. It’s just a question of when. It happens to everybody: horses, dogs, men. Nobody gets out of life alive.”
“I want to acknowledge luck, the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others.”
“I had no natural gift to be anything – not an athlete, not an actor, not a writer, not a director, a painter of garden porches – not anything. So I’ve worked really hard, because nothing ever came easily to me.”
“I’d like to be remembered as a guy who tried – who tried to be part of his times, tried to help people communicate with one another, tried to find some decency in his own life, tried to extend himself as a human being. Someone who isn’t complacent, who doesn’t cop out.”
“I’m grateful for the other things that have come into my life: grandkids, restaurants, charity. I’ve been doing it for 50 years. That’s enough.”
“It’s been a privilege to be here.”
“If you have no enemies, you have no character. Taking a stand always creates opposition.”
