Top 309 Quotes & Sayings by Sylvester Stallone - Page 4

I tell people diets don't work. And I don't care what they say. I have tried them all.

I realized, the older I get, the more difficult life becomes. It's not easier, it's more difficult.

There is an age-old proverb that really does hold true in every area of life - in relations between nations and right down to the most subtle and sophisticated or must unstable and unsophisticated relations between lovers - and it is this: they took "kindness" for "weakness."

Every generation has to find their own heroes.

I have tremendous respect for fighters and I always tell people that boxing in movies is one thing but when you get into the ring for real, even the worst heavyweight in the world is going to murder you. You've just got to appreciate the pain and the suffering and the glory and skill that goes into what they do. That's why I love the sport so much.

We do two things in life: We race the clock and everything is a struggle. One way or not, it's a metaphorical battle all of the time.

Now if you know what you're worth then go out and get what you're worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain't where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain't you! You're better than that!

Theater is like boxing - having the audience ringside. It's instant gratification. Or horrification.

The only happy artist is a dead artist, because only then you can't change. After I die, I'll probably come back as a paintbrush.

Racing's very much like the world of acting. You have your front runners and you have guys that are there for the long race, and you have other guys that block for other people, that are called supporting and character actors. It's all the same kind of situation.

In Philadelphia, there's no delineation, they address me as Rocky, for real. They'll say things like: "Rocky, do you like this coat?" Or: "Rock, say hi to my sister." Or: "Yo Rock, I know a great restaurant." There's no Sylvester. Even the Mayor goes: "It's good to have Rocky here today."

When you find the right components in your life, the right people, that gel with you, then you feel as though you're invincible. It may be a fallacy, but you at least feel as though you can take all that life has to dish out.

The older I get the more things I gotta leave behind.

I thought marriage was tough. Golf's like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel! It's a psychological game that gets into your blood.

Age is a state of old mind. It gets to a point where if you get old enough, you forget how old you are, and that's the best thing. And then you walk around kind of like in a fog.

Until America, door to door, takes every handgun, this is what you're gonna have. It's pathetic. It really is pathetic. It's sad. We're living in the Dark Ages over there.

The more I go to church and the more I turn myself over to the process of believing in Jesus and listening to His Word and having Him guide my hand, I feel as though the pressure is off me now.

Plan B. You've always got to have a Plan B.

I thought I had reached a point in life where everything would be smooth. But it is not. It just gets more jagged and pitted and filled with turns that take you into the dark recesses of your mind. It never seems to get easy.

I don't fall into the physical manifestation of a man of letters. So I guess people assume the scripts are delivered to me under the door.

Everybody has anger or regret in them one way or another. They all try different things to get it out. Some people go to psychiatrists. Some paint pictures. Some people talk it out.

Without the church it's like having a boat without the rudder. You think you can do it on your own and this may sound pedestrian or trite but I'll equate it to this: all my life I've been involved with exercise but no matter how much - and I know a great deal about the body - you need help. You need a trainer. You need to go to a gym and you need to have the expertise and the guidance of someone else. You cannot train yourself. I feel the same way about Christianity and what the church is. The church is the gym of the soul.

I keep trying to tell people. I said, at 40, 45, you're at that crossroads. You really are there. And it's not like you can have gain without pain, but this is it. The days are - like when I wrote this whole thing about, in the beginning of my first magazine. I said, "If you live to be 75 years old, that's 3,900 weekends. That's it."

Without love, loyalty, desires, passion, courage, dignities, faith, beliefs and all the other ingredients that go into making the human soul something so elevated that only God knows its limits, we are only shells bobbing aimlessly in a calm sea of mediocrity. ...And if you can figure that out, please write and explain it to me because you're a better man than I am.

If you look back at life, I bet you will regret about 80% of your actions. But life consists of all mistakes.

The way to be successful in Hollywood is to be as obnoxious as the next guy.

I really am a manifestation of my own fantasy.

I try to eliminate as much dialogue as possible, and I guess Rambo is my really best experiment with how to eliminate dialogue.

Artists die twice. First creatively. Then physically. The second one is the easiest.

If you make exercise your hobby instead of your enemy it becomes your friend; it's the one thing that will never let you down. It will always be there for you and it will always make you better than you were before. Remember: every time you go to the gym, every time you put the right supplement in your mouth, you're better than you were ten minutes ago. [...] The irony is most people know what to do, they just don't do what they know.

To know that the odds are so high that only through the perishing of your life will the minions survive, that's love. That's heroism.

Real love is when you become selfless and you are more concerned about your mate's or children's egos than your own. You're now a giver instead of a taker.

At the very end, the one person who Rambo should kill, he doesn't kill. He lets it live. Because you can't kill that kind of hypocritical bureaucracy. It goes on forever.

Making a movie is the same as an orchestra; it's moving all the different instruments and the sounds, the kinetic and the auditory and the visual all together. I'm probably the trombone.

I'm the Hiroshima of love.

Art is the ability to communicate through an intermediary and to convey one's feelings through an isolated object. It's inspiration and incubation. Putting my subjective feelings into an objective form and then on to you for a subjective interpretation.

Movies are a collective art. Art by proxy.

Once I stopped trying to always do everything my way, and once I asked for God's help, things have truly gone a different direction.

When crossing someone's borders you have to be prepared to engage in a war that is far more brutal than if it were to take place on neutral territory.

If I just know in my gut that a film is going to work, I'll fight to the death over it, and I convince myself. When a movie is purely a money job, the film doesn't have the same sort of intensity, and the audience almost senses it, at least that's the way I perceive it. So, yeah, the idea is to do something that you truly, truly believe in.

To me, the most perfect screenplay ever written will be one word, when you finally reduce it down to that. Until then, writing will be an imperfect form of communication.

There are endless exercises for arms, but the basics are best-chinups and pushups.

I wanted to show I had balls at age 60. Just because society says I'm old, doesn't mean that I am. I'm pursuing happiness, even if it makes the people around me unhappy.

Movies are a whole different ball-game, now. It's much more of a business - very scientific.

Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

Study people's success stories hard. Study their failures even harder.

I watch a lot of news, and I watch musical shows because I think the music of the young people is really their news reports. They let you know how their country is going through their eyes, and about their experiences in the everyday shock of growing up.

Boxing is a great exercise ... as long as you can yell "cut" whenever you want to.

Most of the films I myself like don't do very well. Every director, he has a choice, whether to go for subtlety and try to articulate every minute detail, or to go for the broad strokes and hope that the people will fill in between the lines. I tend to go for the broader strokes.

In this day and age, if you're aspiring to be an actor, and you're putting all your eggs in one basket, you could be disappointed. I started out as an actor, but I forced myself to be a writer, even though I wasn't very good at it and had never written. I don't think I ever passed an English course in my life. My first 8 to 10 scripts were pretty horrendous, but I stayed at it until I eventually found a voice and a subject that people were interested in. So, I recommend that you go out and try to be as versatile as possible: writer, actor, producer and especially director.

I think there's a kind of built-in arrogance to anyone who considers themself an artist. They want to feel as though like they can run the whole spectrum. "I can do it all. I can do minimalism, and I can do classical art." Well, that's not true.

When you're younger you just want to go out and make your mark in the world and doing that, quite often, the people that you love the most and the people you should be closest to suffer from estrangement. I'd be gone nine months a year, so how do you know anyone? When you come home you are a stranger.

You have to have an almost boundless reservoir of energy and interest to enter politics because quite often it's thankless and fruitless and you can't accomplish much.

Clichés are what good writing is all about. Because our lives are basically clichés.

Love is absolute loyalty. People fade, looks fade, but the loyalty never fades.

Through failure, I found different ways to reverse my problems and get into the mainstream of Hollywood.

I never started out to be an action actor. I was an ensemble actor. "Rocky" was an ensemble film. "F.I.S.T." was an ensemble. "Paradise Alley" was an ensemble.

You have to grab life by the throat and squeeze before it grabs you by your neck and breaks it. Own your destiny.

The only thing that I haven't done is perform brain surgery on myself. I've been very, very lucky. I've spared Shakespeare undue stress by not doing that.

I have made a lot of career mistakes, a lot and I have made a lot of personal ones too!