Top 199 Quotes & Sayings by Michael J. Fox - Page 3

Optimism is a cure for many things.

One of the great things about Parkinson's, in a superficial way, is it relieved me of vanity. I don't worry about what I look like, because it's literally out of my hands. But on a deeper level, it gives you a real humility, because you have to deal every day with the fact that you compromise.

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 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.

Chris[topher] Reeve wisely parsed the difference between optimism and hope. Unlike optimism, he said, 'Hope is the product of knowledge and the projection of where the knowledge can take us.

There's a rule in acting called, 'Don't play the result.' If you have a character who's going to end up in a certain place, don't play that until you get there. Play each scene and each beat as it comes. And that's what you do in life: You don't play the result.

I think I benefited from being equal parts ambitious and curious. And of the two, curiosity has served me best.

The way I look at life, and the way I look at the reality of Parkinson's, is that sometimes it's frustrating and sometimes it's funny. I need to look at it that way, and I think other people will look at it that way.

[Constant curiousity 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!

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 teh best that I could do with whatever lay in front of me.

The oldest form of theater is the dinner table.

My natural state is one that's affected by the shortage of dopamine production in my brain. So my natural state is to be halting and at times tremulous and kind of just physically disturbed. I mean, that's my natural state, given the situation in my brain. But I'm always as happy either way. And so when it comes to me, body language lies.

Acceptance is the key to everything.

I always feel very connected to Canada. My reference for everything is my Canadian background, my life in Canada. Particularly on this issue of refugee immigration: I couldn't be prouder of Canada.

The way life runs through everything, even the tiniest elements of nature - that makes me humble. It's the same humility that causes people at a certain time every day to get on their knees and put their foreheads on the ground in honor of something or someone.

The secret to a good marriage, as far as I am concerned, is a joke I make: Keep the fights clean and the sex dirty.

If one of my kids reads a book for school and I can have a conversation with her about the book and I sense that she gets what the book is about, then it doesn't really matter to me if she gets an A on the paper.

I happen to be a Parkinson's patient. I'm not fearful of my condition or my future - but if someone is looking in my eyes for fear, then they see their own fear reflected back at them.

As for my own truncated secondary education, my head was in the clouds as my mom would say, or if you asked my father, up my ass.

Turning fully toward the glass, I consider what I see. This reflected version of myself, wet, shaking, rumpled, pinched, and slightly stoop, would be alarming were it not for the self-satisfied expression pasted across my face. I would ask the obvious question, 'what are you smiling about?' But I already know the answer: 'It just gets better from here.'

I don't burden myself too much with others' expectations - or even my own expectations. I think your happiness grows in direct proportion to your acceptance, and in inverse proportion to your expectations. It's just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other - or doing the next right thing, so to speak.

The laughs mean more to me than the adoration. If two girls walk up to me and one says 'you're cute', I'll say 'thank you', but I appreciate it much more when the other one says 'you make me laugh so much'.

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.

No matter how much fame you have, it's not something that belongs to you. If I'm famous, that doesn't belong to me-that belongs to you. If you can't remember who I am, I'm no longer famous.

Almost instantly [after my announcement of Parkinson's], I saw the first couple of days the coverage was about, you know, "Fox's Parkinson's, blah, blah, blah." Then, two days after that, I saw the coverage turn. It started to become, "Can young people get Parkinson's?" All of a sudden, the conversation turned to become about that. And that was one of the first eye-opening things.

You know you're old when you get a lifetime achievement award. It's a message you've been around too long.

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. Parkinson’s is a perfect metaphor for lack of control. Every unwanted movement in my hand or arm, every twitch that I cannot anticipate or arrest, is a reminder that even in the domain of my own being, I am not calling the shots. I tried to exert control by drinking myself to a place of indifference, which just exacerbated the sense of miserable hopelessness.

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.

I think there's a God and I know it's not me. I don't have a set of tenets, but I live an ethical life.

You suffer the blow, but you capitalize on the opportunity left in its wake.

To be associated with a film that just flat-out makes people happy is such a blessing and a tremendous privilege, and I'll always be grateful for it. People's eyes light up when they talk about it. I've been in Asia, Africa, Europe and even Bhutan; people know the movie there. It's just an amazing thing.

With Parkinson's, it's like you're in the middle of the street and you're stuck there in cement shoes and you know a bus is coming at you, but you don't know when. You think you can hear it rumbling, but you have a lot of time to think. And so you just don't live that moment of the bus hitting you until it happens. There's all kinds of room in that space.

The purpose that you wish to find in life, like a cure you seek, is not going to fall from the sky. ...I believe purpose is something for which one is responsible; it's not just divinely assigned.

I can say, "I don't have anything I regret!" But I can also say, "I can go forward in my life the way it is and I don't think I'll accrue any future regrets."

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, its still okay to feel responsible for someone else's. Live and to learn.

The biggest gift on Father's Day is if I can be with all my kids.

I saw a birthday card the other day, and it said, "If you didn't know how old you were, how old would you think you were?" I started changing it in my mind right away to, "If you didn't know how sick you were, how sick would you think you were?"

Disease is a non-partisan problems that requires a non-partisan solution.

Life is the power that's greater than I can ever comprehend.

To be brutally honest, for much of that time, I was the only person in the world with Parkinson's. Of course, I mean that in the abstract. I had become acutely aware of people around me who appears to have the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, but as long as they didn't identify with me, I was in no rush to identify with them. My situation allowed, if not complete denial, at least a thick padding of insulation.

Ironic that in order to do my life's work, I had to quit my day job.

If Spirituality is that you're humble in the face of forces greater than you and you believe those forces are more inclined toward being good than being bad, then I'm a spiritual person.

As with any turning point or instance when a new road is chosen and an old one forsaken, there are consequences.

I think we all get our own bag of hammers. We all get our own Parkinson's. We all have our own thing. I think that we'll look at it through the filter of that experience, and we'll say, "Yeah, I need to laugh at my stuff, too."

They did something once that slurred my speech, and I thought, "Oh, man, you're messing with my brain. It's freaking me out."

When I started it [non for profit], I thought, I'm not smart enough to do this. I had no experience in management, no experience in administration, no experience in nonprofit; but then this phrase came into my head: I only have to be smart enough to find people who are smarter than me; I only have to be smart enough to recognize who knows more than me.

I have now is whenever my kids say, "Can you look at this?" or "Can I ask you something?" or "Can you come here for a minute?" no matter what I am doing, I say yes instead of saying, "Just a sec." They never abuse the privilege, and I never once regretted it. What they took me away to do was never less important than what I was doing already.

I might have skipped class, but I didn't miss any lessons.

If you were to rush into this room right now and announce that you had struck a deal - with God, Allah, Buddha, Christ, Krishna, Bill Gates, whomever - in which the ten years since my diagnosis could be magically taken away, traded in for ten more years as the person I was before - I would, without a moment's hesitation, tell you to take a hike.

There's a connection that's hard to explain. It's the feeling I get when I see someone shuffle up to meet me, or say something, and I can instantly tell by the cant of their head or by the movement of their arms -- and these are people who aren't even full-blown symptomatic -- that they're one of us. And the look they give me, it's not just gratitude -- I don't care about the gratitude -- but solidarity. And shared optimism. And a resiliency that just makes me think we're doing the right thing, and that this truly is a community.

Control is illusory. No matter what university you go to, no matter what degree you hold, if your goal is to becomes master of your own destiny, you have more to learn.

I got sick of turning on the TV and seeing my face.

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.

He gave life to the breath- oxygen, a simple gas, he transferred into words, ideas, hope.

I'm glad I don't have a drinking problem,' I confided, 'because I don't think I'd ever be able to quit.

[My son] will have a fairly stable future. Not one where the schoolyard talk is whose father grossed $8 million on his last picture.

I think there's a God and I know it's not me.

Listening to people espouse beliefs different from mine is informative, not threatening, because the only thing that can alter my worldview is a new and undeniable truth, and contrary to what Jack Nicholson says in 'A Few Good Men', "I CAN handle the truth.

My tattoo is that I don't have a tattoo.

I don't want people to kick my ass, I just want to get to a point where they can't kick it.