Top 258 Quotes & Sayings by Morgan Freeman - Page 3

You want to retire from a job you're not that all enamoured with. I love what I do. I want to keep doing it till I can't get out of bed doing it.

If you get called on to help somebody pull focus to some good cause, that's good use of your fame. I don't try to avoid that.

I was raised in Mississippi, so heat and humidity is my bread and butter. It keeps me going. I can't stand cold weather.

Being blind is as simple as closing your eyes. The blind don't act any different than you or I. You never see a blind person going around saying, 'I'm blind.' So if you want to play blind just close your eyes and keep them closed and fare thee well.

The best way to confront, or deal with, technological innovation is to keep moving technologically.

I don't remember what my favourite comedy film is - truthfully! I saw Borat and I thought I was not going to be able to get out of the theatre because I was in so much pain from the laughter.

So we say, oh, my goodness; we think we've found another Earth-like planet. We will start trying to figure out how to get there. And I have this strong belief that whatever we think we can do, whatever we can dream, we can do.

I think one of the things when you're casting children is you're also casting their parents.

Part of acting is having the security to turn yourself loose and let yourself go in order to reach whatever depths a character has. If your guts aren't hanging out there, you don't offer anything.

Playing is no challenge; every time that you get a role you get to go play with other people in the sandbox and so there is no challenge, real challenge. The challenge, the major challenge is getting the work, finding the sandbox.

In my home, who is my boss? If you ask my wife she'll say certainly not her. She claims that she can't make me do anything and so she's not my boss. I am. I'm pretty sure, maybe.

The odds are lousy that I actually said something attributed to me.

There's an exercise we do where someone is sat behind you and you're asked to close your eyes and fall backwards. That's acting.

It seems to me that I never grow unless I'm actually working with other actors who have shed whatever shell it is that keeps them insulated from each other.

"You are the actor, and I understand we already had our sit down, you explained your concept, your view," so I said, "Okay, I'm in your hands." That means that if you've got to nudge me a little bit to the right I move to the right, just from the pressure, weight, but you won't have to touch me at all. You can come and go "Okay, you want me over here a little bit more," so no pressure on us at all that's easy to do.

One day very soon, we'll be asked: what did we do. And we will say: we did everything we could... we have to... because if we don't there won't be anyone left to ask. We have never faced a crisis this big, that we have never had better ideas to solve. This is our only home. We can choose today to make a world of difference.

I try to keep my mind active. I'm a solitaire and puzzle addict. I exercise religiously. I don't do many things religiously and I've taken up golf to have something to do when I have nothing to do.

A lot of people are going around saying, 'You won the Academy Award for such and such.' 'No. I didn't.' 'You didn't?' 'Well, you should have.'

What I haven't talked about I don't intend to talk about.

You're not going to be able to look like anyone else, no matter how hard you try, unless you're a mimic, then you're not acting, you're just mimicking. You can't go on being John Wayne, that's John Wayne. So you're not going to steal from John Wayne. I'm not going to steal from John Wayne and you're not going to come back and say 'Didn't you get that from the circus?' You know. But he is one of those people who instructs me, whom I look up to - whom I think is one of the masters of his craft that I am so enamoured of.

If we don't save the oceans, if we don't do something about what we're doing to the oceans, as well as the planet at large, we're going to be really sorry.

I think you have to be left-brained, to a certain extent, to understand science. I can talk about it, but I can't do it.

The better the actor, usually the safer you feel working with.

That's really just the worst part of life really, you get bracketed somewhere and the next thing you know people are saying, 'No. No. That's not the type. Get me so and so.' I'm not a type. I'm an actor.

As the mask of deception falls off the face of humanity Unveiling the grim reality of duality In which everyone is a casualty, no one will be exempt Truth has many shades It's not a matter of black and white, but gray Although many, we are one, so in the final analysis Could it be that we are fighting a war that can't be won?

Let me tell you what justice is. Justice is the law. And that man's feeble attempt to lay down the principles of deceny.

Somebody once said to me after I'd done "Deep Impact," "What is it like to play a Black president," and I said, "I didn't play a Black president. I played a president. I just happened to be Black. There's a difference.

One universe, four forces, billions of galaxies. The precision and complexity of our world is enough to make even the famous cosmologist go just a little bit crazy. How does it all fit together? Is there a single, overarching design to the cosmos? And if we find it, will we glimpse the mind of God?

I don't do cold. My reaction to cold is drastic. I'm a southern boy.

I'm always trying new things and learning new things. If there isn't anything more you can learn - go off and die.

I don't think that anyone learns anything. Well, I mean, you do always learn something if you have your eyes and ears open. You do learn something from every outing, every time that you go for it. But for me what actors do is interact and that's why you have to do that.

Everybody works the same, but the preparation very often may be different. You cannot work differently. You have to say the words that were written on the page, and you have to make your marks. That's the work.

I believe in helping the planet survive, and that includes reaching out to help some of the disappearing creatures whose habitats we're destroying. It's up to us to somehow reverse that trend. I don't know how we'll achieve it, but we need to.

I don't have anybody telling me what to say. I have people who would suggest, maybe, that I shouldn't do this, that or the other, but that's strictly up to me.

I believe it doesn't really matter where you work as long as you work. Keep sharpening your teeth.

I avoid seeing myself while I'm working on role so I won't see "me."

The surest way to lose at any endeavor is to quit.

It [love about acting] is all about role playing - the same thing you do when you're a kid, when you play with dolls or toys and make up stories. I never grew out of it.

Nobody is trying to save energy. We're trying to shift our use of fuel. Forget saving energy; if we get the right kind of energy, there are endless amounts.

Nelson Mandela was a man of incomparable honor, unconquerable strength, and unyielding resolve---a saint to many, a hero to all who treasure liberty, freedom and the dignity of humankind.

I'm married, I've been married to the same woman for - well, I've been with the same woman for close to...long enough to fool around.

Acting means living, it's all I do.

Doing comedy is as easy as doing anything else. You're dependent totally on the material.

We’re turning everything on the planet into food for humans so we’re cutting down the rainforests, displacing all of the animals, and we’re doing all this to feed humans... ... Imagine if there were only 2 billion people polluting? We’re already overpopulated. I feel we’ve become a parasite on this planet. If this population keeps growing, we’ll just keep devouring the planet, and I don’t think it’s going to stand for that very long.

I think you take a job, you owe it as much passion as the job itself demands. And most jobs demand that you be totally committed.

I think the best thing somebody ever did to me was my mother opening her legs and squirting me out.

Your job is always the same if it's a juggernaut or if it's just one of these little jewels of a film that's gonna wind up at the Laemmle or something, so your job doesn't change whatsoever... give it your best shot.

If you're comfortable on a horse, you're comfortable on a horse. It's like being on a motorbike.

I am passionate about what is going on with the oceans, mainly because we are for some idiotic reason, really screwing it up. I mean, we're really killing the ocean. It's like putting out the sun. Without it, there is no us.

Every job's a challenge. The challenge is to do it and make it look right, like you belong there - wherever that is.

I seldom get into the mood of the story. It's acting. I go in, I act, I quit. I don't take anything away from it.

I was very lucky once I got started with a career. I happened to get some really good parts to play with some really good people to play with.

They're talking about kids who have grand mal seizures, and they've discovered that marijuana eases that down to where these children can have a life. That right there, to me, says, 'Legalize it across the board!'

You can make anything into a play for the simple reason that the human mind is one of the best writers in the business. So, if you've got a writer who's clever enough to give you enough clues, you will fill out every blank spot in a play, every single one.

The bigger point here is that golf is a good metaphor for one's life. The challenge of golf for me is trying to learn new rules. It's something you always have to work at; you don't get perfect at golf. It's the never-ending quest for betterment.

I know people are saying they like you. I'm not being insulted or pushed around or anything. People are coming up because they like me. Nevertheless, I can't be everybody's...none of us can. I hate saying no to people.

I had gone to school to work on technique and found it wasn't something that was really worthwhile to me, although it probably was.

I have a problem with writer/directors, personal. I can't work well with both of them on the set, if both of them are giving instructions. Writers tend to be in love with what they wrote. You can't always translate the words into the meaning, sometimes the meaning is better served without the words, difficult to make a writer to try to understand that. It gets, sometimes, tense.

I think the educational value is what comes first. I've always thought that the most effective tools we have for disseminating information, i.e. education, is television and film.

Ive got a lot of life left in me and I want to live it doing things I like to do.