Top 105 Sylvester Stallone Quotes

When I was in junior high school, the teachers voted me the student most likely to end up in the electric chair.

Action is always seen as the bottom rung of thespian endeavour, that’s just the way it is.

I tend to think of action movies as exuberant morality plays in which good triumphs over evil.

Boxing is sort of an inevitability. We know they are going to be pounding each other.

For every guy, there is an opportunity to be a lot better than he thought he could be. We can’t all be the star of the team, but we can be a star in our life. That’s where you set your goal.

I have great expectations for the future, because the past was highly overrated.

I’ve never made a film that lost money.

I was very much into buying contemporary art, but I’ve just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it’s not great art, but all of a sudden my mood has changed, and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters.

I believe an artist dies twice. The first time, it’s just terrible – I’ve been there when the phone isn’t ringing for years.

I am not the richest, smartest or most talented person in the world, but I succeed because I keep going and going and going.

For ‘Rocky II,’ I got a torn pectoral muscle, I got all beat up inside, I had to have an operation to splice things back together.

On the sequel, you’ve lost the element of surprise. Usually, on the first one you may not go very, very deep into character; the second one you start to explore the character a bit more.

I’ve made a lot of career mistakes. A lot. Actually, a lot of personal ones, too.

The day I can’t walk is the day I quit movies.

That’s what Rocky is all about: pride, reputation, and not being another bum in the neighborhood.

I wish I had thought of Velcro muscles myself. I didn’t have to go to the gym for all those years, all the hours wedded to the iron game, as we call it.

The action movies changed radically when it became possible to Velcro your muscles on. It was the beginning of a new era. The visual took over. The special effects became more important than the single person. That was the beginning of the end.

When I saw ‘Hercules,’ my mind just exploded because I was extremely thin; I was insecure. I literally ran out of the theatre and started lifting things, anything I could think of – milk crates. I’m still lifting things. It changed my life.

Once in one’s life, for one mortal moment, one must make a grab for immortality; if not, one has not lived.

Movies are the work of a collective conscious. It takes 500-800 people on a movie to complete a vision.

Don’t be gullible, use life before it uses you. Understand there are no free lunches, and for every action you take, there’s a reaction.

I was an insecure kid. Once I saw ‘Hercules’ with Steve Reeves, it completely changed my life. If I had never gone to that film, I wouldn’t be here today.

Just because society says I’m old doesn’t mean I am.

I was an ambitious child and I tended to be scatterbrained. If I was at school and saw a bird outside the window I wanted to follow it. I was adventurous.

If you express yourself too much, you’re considered weak.

I have a lack of fear, whereas in the past the fear of failure was a powerful motivator. Anyway, I have great expectations for the future, but I just don’t know if I’m the monarch of all I survey.

I have tons of regrets, but I think that’s one of the reasons that push people to create things. Out of their angst, their regret, comes the best from artists, painters and writers.

Success is usually the culmination of controlling failure.

Most action is based on redemption and revenge, and that’s a formula. Moby Dick was formula. It’s how you get to the conclusion that makes it interesting.

I think that’s become passe, but if you can surround yourself with a kind of monument to yourself and your family – a statement – and you can afford it, then that’s a noble project.

There’s no one in the world close to Arnold Schwarzenegger. He is a phenomenon. He’s brilliant. Just because his physique belies that, don’t underestimate him.

I know I’m incredibly unpredictable, and that’s the only thing I’m sure of.

I have two lovely sons and some good memories, but I’ve had a rather tumultuous personal life. It hasn’t been dull; I’ve been the Hiroshima of love.

I’m not right wing, I’m not left wing. I love my country.

I know people get upset and go, ‘They’re going to take away the assault weapon’. But who needs an assault weapon? Like, really, unless you’re carrying out an assault.

Characters I’ve played, they used to impact my paintings, like 80 percent of the time, and especially when I was doing an action film.

I respect a woman too much to marry her.

When you’re scared, when you’re hanging on, when life is hurting you, then you’re going to see what you’re really made of.

Voices are like fingerprints, from Cagney to Bogart. They never lost it. My voice is instrumental in categorizing me.

I believe any success in life is made by going into an area with a blind, furious optimism.

When I tried to play characters that strayed from who I am it ended in disaster. People didn’t expect me in comedies or musicals.

Playing polo is like trying to play golf during an earthquake.

When I tried to branch out into comedy, I didn’t do very well at it, so I went back to doing what I do naturally well, or what the audience expects from me – action pictures.

I’m not handsome in the classical sense. The eyes droop, the mouth is crooked, the teeth aren’t straight, the voice sounds like a Mafioso pallbearer, but somehow it all works.

When you’re on top and you lead the parade, everyone’s there throwing lilies and lilac water on your head. But when those parades have gone by and there’s a storm in your heart, there are very few people that are going to sit there and listen to you bemoan life.

You have to be really loyal to the people that supported you when you were coming up.

You know what I think happened? After ‘Rocky,’ I was almost set up in the eyes of the media to make a flop.

I made some truly awful movies. ‘Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot’ was the worst. If you ever want someone to confess to murder just make him or her sit through that film. They will confess to anything after 15 minutes.

When I was a kid, my mother used to feed me mashed-potato sandwiches, brussel sprout sandwiches; my brain cells were starving from lack of food. I’ll eat anything. I’ll eat dirt.

When people meet me, they’re often surprised – I talk a great deal.

Now it really is, believe it or not, 90% of the films are green lit, not by the studio heads, but by the marketing department.

Nothing’s harder than writing. There’s no comparison. With directing, you can bounce a lot of ideas around. There’s tremendous support – you’ve got editors and sound mixers. With writing, it’s all you, and it’s just crippling when people tear up your pages.

There aren’t a lot of opportunities for that rite of passage that makes you a man. War is one of them, and violent sports are another.

With a lot of comedians, one of their major attributes is that they look comedic, with a certain hangdog or manic expression. I look like the neighborhood bully. That doesn’t elicit laughter.

Rambo isn’t violent. I see Rambo as a philanthropist.

When boxers are in the ring, they’re simple. It’s when the fight is over, that’s when the other fight, the real fight, begins. That’s the problem.

A lot of guys don’t want to admit that they have a propensity for generosity and for violence.

You know you’ve been around when they start to remake your own movies when you’re still alive.

The trouble with remakes is that people fall in love with the original. It’s like peanut butter. If you try to change the taste of peanut butter, you’re in trouble.

I’ve kind of fashioned my life after a Slinky. Bend me in a million shapes, and eventually I’ll spring back to what I originally was.

If bad decorating was a hanging offense, there’d be bodies hanging from every tree!

I never quite understood these actors – though I envy them sometimes – who can lie out for a year or two. I feel as though time is a real pressing issue, and I want to get as much work done in the time that I have left.

If you’re willing to take the humiliation of sticking your head above the crowd, maybe it’s, you know, the pleasure will be worth the pain.

I try to combine in my paintings cinematic feeling, emotional feeling, and sometimes actually writing on the page to combine all the different elements of communication.

There might have been a period around ‘Tango & Cash’ when I was nearly fashionable. My problem is that my weight’s always been changing for the movies I’m in.

There’ll never be a ‘Rocky IV.’ You gotta call a halt.