Top 100 Michael J. Fox Quotes
#1. 'Why do you think it is ... ', I asked Dr. Cook ... 'that brain surgery, above all else-even rocket science-gets singled out as the most challenging of human feats, the one demanding the utmost of human intelligence?' [Dr. Cook answered,] 'No margin for error.'
Michael J. Fox
#2. Just as Parkinson's isn't a big topic of conversation in my house, neither is my career.
Michael J. Fox
#3. I can't be smug, because I know that you can lose anything at any point. And I can't be angry, because I haven't lost it.
Michael J. Fox
#4. I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm an activist, I'm a writer and I'm just a student of the world.
Michael J. Fox
#5. The American political experience can therefore be viewed as optimism in the collective.
Michael J. Fox
#7. 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.
Michael J. Fox
#8. I think the scariest person in the world is the person with no sense of humor.
Michael J. Fox
#9. I don't subscribe to any particular doctrine or ideology. I just think that there's kind of a good and bad, the good being life in its purest, happiest form, and the other being the darker side of existence.
Michael J. Fox
#10. You suffer the blow, but you capitalize on the opportunity left in its wake.
Michael J. Fox
#11. There's always failure. And there's always disappointment. And there's always loss. But the secret is learning from the loss, and realizing that none of those holes are vacuums.
Michael J. Fox
#12. I've never gotten up to see something one of my kids wanted to show me and not been rewarded.
Michael J. Fox
#13. 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.
Michael J. Fox
#14. Look at the choices you have, not the choices that have been taken away from you. In them, there are whole worlds of strength and new ways to look at things.
Michael J. Fox
#15. Still, what's happened before and what may happen later can't be as important as what's happening now.
Michael J. Fox
#16. I take the medication for myself so I can transact, not for anyone else. But I am aware that it is empowering for people to see what I do and, for the most part, people in the Parkinson's community are just really happy that Parkinson's is getting mentioned, and not in a pitying way.
Michael J. Fox
#17. 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.
Michael J. Fox
#18. They did something once that slurred my speech, and I thought, "Oh, man, you're messing with my brain. It's freaking me out."
Michael J. Fox
#19. I really love being alive. I love my family and my work. I love the opportunity I have to do things. That's what happiness is.
Michael J. Fox
#20. It seems to me that the quality of a moment in time is not always a reflection of the moment in and of itself - what happens before and what happens after are often what give it its savor.
Michael J. Fox
#21. Frankly, my height or lack thereof never bothered me much. Although there is no doubt that it has contributed to a certain mental toughness. I've made the most of the head start one gains from being underestimated.
Michael J. Fox
#22. Family is not an important thing, it is everything
Michael J. Fox
#23. I have no choice about whether or not I have Parkinson's. I have nothing but choices about how I react to it. In those choices, there's freedom to do a lot of things in areas that I wouldn't have otherwise found myself in.
Michael J. Fox
#24. If I were overweight because I ate too much, I would have far more of a complex. I would know if I just stopped eating and showed a little discipline I would be thin. But there's not a hell of a lot I can do about being short. You just gotta run with it.
Michael J. Fox
#25. The only unavailable choice was whether or not to have Parkinson's. Everything else was up to me.
Michael J. Fox
#26. I had all the usual ambition growing up. I wanted to be a writer, a musician, a hockey player. I wanted to do something that wasn't nine to five. Acting was the first thing I tried that clicked.
Michael J. Fox
#27. As with any turning point or instance when a new road is chosen and an old one forsaken, there are consequences.
Michael J. Fox
#28. Ironic that in order to do my life's work, I had to quit my day job.
Michael J. Fox
#29. My whole life, meeting people is like a blind date, because I feel like they've already seen the video on me.
Michael J. Fox
#30. When you're a short actor you stand on apple boxes, you walk on a ramp. When you're a short star everybody else walks in a ditch.
Michael J. Fox
#31. Teenagers blithely skip off to uncertain futures, while their parents sit weeping curbside in the Volvo, because the adolescent brain isn't yet formed enough to recognize and evaluate risk.
Michael J. Fox
#32. I wouldn't have wanted to miss the opportunity to make those three films that didn't do well. They were really important to me, and the things I learned doing them were important to me.
Michael J. Fox
#34. The biggest gift on Father's Day is if I can be with all my kids.
Michael J. Fox
#35. As much as Parkinson's is about movement, the end stage is being frozen. So the more I let that happen, the more I'm gonna be stuck within that and unable to reverse it.
Michael J. Fox
#38. Lance Armstrong showed up, and I started talking to him; I saw all these people with cancer who followed him to Paris for the Tour de France, and I saw the difference he was making in their lives. That put it together for me ... having it be not so much about me, but [my being] a vehicle for it.
Michael J. Fox
#39. I always felt that I came up short in the education department, but I've come to the conclusion that we all get an education.
Michael J. Fox
#40. It is one of the great ironies of my life that only when it became virtually impossible for me to keep my body from moving would I find the peace, security, and spiritual strength to stand in one place. I couldn't be still until I could - literally - no longer keep still.
Michael J. Fox
#42. Do the right thing, and then do the next right thing, and that will lead you to the next right thing after that.
Michael J. Fox
#43. 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.
Michael J. Fox
#44. I began to long for the benign indifference of Robert Redford flossing his molars.
Michael J. Fox
#45. I have so many things that I say to my kids, I just drive them crazy.
Michael J. Fox
#46. My notion of spirituality was different than it is now, but even if I'd been the most fundamentalist of believers, I would have assumed that God had better things to do than arbitrarily smite me with shaking palsy.
Michael J. Fox
#47. Discipline is just doing the same thing the right way whether anyone's watching or not.
Michael J. Fox
#48. 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.
Michael J. Fox
#49. I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business.
Michael J. Fox
#50. My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.
Michael J. Fox
#51. The 'Rescue Me' gig was a unique opportunity to play a character - a misanthropic, angry guy - who was so contrary to how people think of me.
Michael J. Fox
#52. I see possibilities in everything. For everything that's taken away, something of greater value has been given.
Michael J. Fox
#53. Hanging out with Sam or any two-year-old is basically one big suicide watch. Their mission is to find one new way after another of offing themselves - piss in an electric socket, lick a pit bull's nose, chase an ice cream truck into traffic - and your job as a parent is to step in before it happens.
Michael J. Fox
#54. That's the way I look at things - if you focus on the worst case scenario and it happens, you've lived it twice. It sounds like Pollyanna-ish tripe but I'm telling you - it works for me.
Michael J. Fox
#55. 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'.
Michael J. Fox
#56. Life delivered me a catastrophe, but I found a richness of soul.
Michael J. Fox
#57. By 21, I was earning six figures a week. By 23, I had a Ferrari. It was nuts.
Michael J. Fox
#58. I still play hockey every now and then, and I still golf. But my biggest exercise is walking my big dog in the park every day.
Michael J. Fox
#59. 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?"
Michael J. Fox
#60. 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.
Michael J. Fox
#61. I got sick of turning on the TV and seeing my face.
Michael J. Fox
#62. Everybody in the world knew who I was before I knew who I was.
Michael J. Fox
#63. Medical science has proven time and again that when the resources are provided, great progress in the treatment, cure, and prevention of disease can occur.
Michael J. Fox
#64. I'm sure there are many other Forrest Gump moments that I'm forgetting. I don't mention them as boasts, but rather as evidence of how ridiculously lucky I have been to have lived the life that I have.
Michael J. Fox
#65. The only thing worse than an opportunity you don't deserve is blowing an opportunity.
Michael J. Fox
#66. I don't have a set of tenets, but I live an ethical life. I practice a humility that presupposes there's a power greater than myself. And I always believe, don't inflict harm where it's not necessary.
Michael J. Fox
#67. I don't have any affirmations, I don't have any of that stuff. My natural state is to look at things as possibilities and as opportunities.
Michael J. Fox
#68. I don't want people to kick my ass, I just want to get to a point where they can't kick it.
Michael J. Fox
#69. My experience is to deal with things through humor.
Michael J. Fox
#70. Being in control of your own destiny is a myth - and wouldn't be half as much fun anyway. 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, it's still okay to feel responsible for someone else's.
Michael J. Fox
#71. 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.
Michael J. Fox
#72. Now I feel and I say all the time that vanity is, like, long gone. I'm really free of worrying about what I look like, because it's out of my shaky hands. I don't control it. So why would I waste one second of my life worrying about it?
Michael J. Fox
#73. No matter how much money you have, you can lose it.
Michael J. Fox
#74. It may seem hard to believe, but it's catastrophe that offers the most promise for an even richer life. This is the gateway to the good stuff. In other words, you never truly know which way the wind is blowing until the shit hits the fan.
Michael J. Fox
#75. If you fixate on the worst-case scenario and it actually happens, you've lived it twice.
Michael J. Fox
#76. Life is the power that's greater than I can ever comprehend. The way life runs through everything, even the tiniest elements of nature - that makes me humble.
Michael J. Fox
#77. I mean, I enjoy my work as an actor. But to make a difference in people's lives through advocacy and through supporting research - that's the kind of privilege that few people will get, and it's certainly bigger than being on TV every Thursday for half an hour.
Michael J. Fox
#78. No, I got a GED in my 30s. My kids know that I never stop learning, and they know I love reading. I have books overflowing everywhere. I am current on today's events and I read the paper every day, and we talk about it, so they see that appetite.
Michael J. Fox
#79. He gave life to the breath- oxygen, a simple gas, he transferred into words, ideas, hope.
Michael J. Fox
#80. I urge you to be challenged and inspired by what you do not know.
Michael J. Fox
#81. I'm also very proud to be a part of a trilogy of films that, if they do nothing else, allow people to check their problems at the door, sit down and have a good time.
Michael J. Fox
#82. I've learned some exciting things - mostly, that people really want to help each other; and that, if you can lay out a vision for them - and that vision is sincere and genuine - they'll get interested.
Michael J. Fox
#83. Humility is always a good thing. It's always a good thing to be humbled by circumstances so you can then come from a sincere place to try to deal with them.
Michael J. Fox
#84. Everything is cause and effect. If you don't move, nothing will move with you, and nothing will move toward you.
Michael J. Fox
#85. My wife is Jewish, and therefore, it's my children's birthright to be Jewish.
Michael J. Fox
#86. 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.
Michael J. Fox
#88. 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.
Michael J. Fox
#89. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it saved my ass.
Michael J. Fox
#90. I wouldn't have minded living in Provence for a month or however long it took for me to learn to say, 'I've been attacked by a wild boar. Help me find my spleen!
Michael J. Fox
#91. I believe that the majority of times the scale tilts toward the good. It's this amazing thing that rolls on and if we get in the flow of it, that's God. And if we fight it, if we swim the other way, we're swimming away from the purest expression of this life.
Michael J. Fox
#92. 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.
Michael J. Fox
#94. If I don't get food in my mouth, I'm still happy. If my pants are round my ankles, as long as I don't get arrested for indecent exposure, I'm happy. I'm worried about keeping my hair, not how it's combed.
Michael J. Fox
#95. Was an antidote to the self-consciousness that consumed me as an eccentric teenager in search of an identity.
Michael J. Fox
#96. Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.
Michael J. Fox
#97. The least amount of judging we can do, the better off we are.
Michael J. Fox
#98. The only way for government to express the needs and desires of Americans is if Americans speak up and get involved.
Michael J. Fox
#99. The moment I understood this - that my Parkinson's was the one thing I wasn't going to change - I started looking at the things I could change, like the way research is funded.
Michael J. Fox
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