Henry Winkler quotes: “Fonzie” on being cool, overcoming a learning disability, tenacity, gratitude, women, and more.
“Your mind knows only some things. Your inner voice, your instinct, knows everything. If you listen to what you know instinctively, it will always lead you down the right path.”
“You don’t have any idea how powerful you are and what you can achieve. You literally cannot give in to your fear. You literally have got to walk over it, step on it’s face and keep moving toward where you want to go and eventually, if I can get there, there’s no reason you can’t get there.”
“You learn that where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
“A human being’s first responsibility is to shake hands with himself.”
“You don’t know what you can accomplish until you try.”
“You got nothing to fear but fear itself.”
“I guess the key is, no matter how many times you fall over, you dust yourself off and you keep moving.”
“‘If you will it, it is not a dream,’ which has since become, ‘I will try.'”
“You cannot represent cool. You’ve got to be cool. You’ve got to be authentic. I think, after all these years, that is how I define cool. It is being authentic. That is powerful.”
“Be in the moment and do not worry about being right.”
“If you are able to communicate your feelings you can speak an international, very articulate language.”
“Life is what you make of it. You’re as young as you feel. Age is a state of mind.”
“How you learn has nothing to do with how brilliant you are.”
“It is the parent’s job to see how their child learns and to make sure that the children’s self-confidence is buoyed at all times, or they will plummet like a stone.”
“As a child, I was called stupid and lazy. On the SAT I got 159 out of 800 in math. My parents had no idea that I had a learning disability.”
“Not every child learns the same way. I could not learn through my eyes. Reading was impossible. Math, to compute it in my mind, was impossible. I learned everything through listening.”
“You learn to negotiate with your learning challenge. I improvised. I never read anything the way that it was written in my entire life. I could instantly memorize some of it and then what I didn’t know, I made up and threw caution to the wind and did it with conviction and sometimes I made them laugh and sometimes I got hired.”
“Every book I read I have to read in hardcover and it has to be on my shelf so I can see it because every one of them is a triumph.”
“This is what I know: a learning challenge doesn’t have to stop you. Your learning challenge will not stop you from meeting your dream. Only you will stop yourself from meeting your dream.”
“Somebody asked me if I could go back and start again with a different brain, would I. Years ago I thought yes, I would, and now I know I wouldn’t. Because whatever challenges I had in school, I guess they forced me to where I am today. So I now see them as an asset.”
“You cannot assume that somebody can define you. You cannot assume that the other person is right. No matter how they say it to you, no matter with how much force they say, ‘Oh
my God, you’ll never make it; oh my God, you’re not bright; you could never do this’ – that’s one person. I can’t tell you how many people told me I would never be an actor.”
“If you were to ask me for two defining words – for life and fishing – I’d say ‘tenacity and gratitude.’ Tenacity lets you get where you want to go, and gratitude doesn’t allow you to be angry along the way.”
“Snowflakes are one of nature’s most fragile things, but just look at what they can do when they stick together.”
“When Richie Cunningham drank too many beers, his parents sat him down and explained their concerns. If you live on this earth, you find out that we are all the same.”
“‘The Fonz’ was the yin to my yang. He was everything I wanted to be because there was nothing cool about me growing up. I became good-looking when I was 28, when Happy Days started. Suddenly girls were knocking on my hotel door. Being chased was wonderful with a capital W. Holy mackerel, yes! I was happy to take advantage of that for a couple of years.”
“Do I love ‘The Fonz?’ Yes. Did he introduce me to the world? Did I get letters from 126 countries, 50,000 letters a week? Yes. So all I did was flip the numbers. And I am now, as an actor, what I dreamt of being when I was 27. When I was 27, I wanted to be a certain kind of actor, and I was not relaxed enough with myself to be that actor. I had to work really hard to get here.”
“I don’t always keep my cool like ‘The Fonz,’ but my love for my kids has given me plenty of ‘happy days.'”
“To have people like my work, even if it’s my old work, I can’t ask for nothing nicer than that.”
“[On winning an Emmy] If you stay at it long enough, the chips come to you. Tonight I got to clear the table.”
“I love my job. I love my job. Most people my age are sitting at home either waiting for the phone to ring or calling their phone to find it. I am having so much fun and I love the people I’m working with.”
“Cursing is really important. There are moments where it diminishes you, if that’s the only thing you can say to a person. But sometimes it’s like poetry.”
“When you love what you do, then you’re talking to one of the luckiest guys on the face of the earth.”
“Assumptions are the termites of relationships.”
“Every longtime relationship is work. A longtime relationship doesn’t just flow like a river. There are twists and turns. You have to want to be in it.”
“I’ve been married to Stacey Winkler for 30 years. The key to an enduring relationship is in the ear, not the heart or mind. How you think or feel about what you are saying is not what is important. What matters is how they hear it. After 30 years, there is only one reason to stay together – because you really want to.”
“I don’t know. I have no dream. Dream that it continues. I want to act until I can no longer do it. That’s my dream. I am so happy that I’m doing this.”
“I’m an actor, producer, director; I write children’s books; and I’m in the bottom three percent of people academically in America. I am what I am. I do all these different jobs. I am dyslexic. I can’t spell. Doing math in my head is as if I were to speak Russian at this moment. I am what I am and I am pretty comfortable with who I am and how I got to where I am with my learning challenges.”
“Ten out of ten people die, so don’t take life too seriously.”
By the way, this is why millionaires study quotes.
