Top 60 Michael J. Fox Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

I didn’t want o do metal work and get my hands all nicked up and be around guys. So I took drama because there were a lot of girls.

I have a remarkably normal life.

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.

I discovered that I was part of a Parkinson’s community with similar experiences and similar questions that I’d been dealing with alone.

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.

Family is not an important thing. It’s everything.

I see possibilities in everything. For everything that’s taken away, something of greater value has been given.

I have times when I’m off-balance. I have times when I slur my words. I have times when I walk into walls. I have times when I can’t remember somebody’s name.

What other people think about me is not my business.

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.

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.

The only thing worse than an opportunity you don’t deserve is blowing an opportunity.

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.

My view of life is colored by humor and looking at the best in any situation.

I don’t set a whole lot of goals. It smacks a little bit of will to me, and I find that will is not the way to go for me.

I often say now I don’t have any choice whether or not I have Parkinson’s, but surrounding that non-choice is a million other choices that I can make.

Always be available to your kids. Because if you say, ‘Give me five minutes, give me ten minutes,’ it’ll be 15, it’ll be 20. And then when you get there, the shine will have worn off whatever it is they wanted to share with you.

As a kid, I was into music, played guitar in a band. Then I started acting in plays in junior high school and just got lost in the puzzle of acting, the magic of it. I think it was an escape for me.

No matter how much money you have, you can lose it.

Life delivered me a catastrophe, but I found a richness of soul.

Pity is just another form of abuse.

Vanity’s really overrated. When I was 20, teenage girls had my picture on the wall… I don’t need to be pretty anymore. I just am who I am.

One’s dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but cannot be taken away unless it is surrendered.

I like to encourage people to realize that any action is a good action if it’s proactive and there is positive intent behind it.

So what I say about Tracy is this: Tracy’s big challenge is not having a Parkinson’s patient for a husband. It’s having me for a husband. I happen to be a Parkinson’s patient.

Pain is temporary, film is forever.

The thing that brings people to wail at a wall, or face Mecca, or to go to church, is a search for that feeling of purity.

My wife is Jewish, and therefore, it’s my children’s birthright to be Jewish.

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.

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.

In my 50s I’ll be dancing at my children’s weddings.

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.

If you asked my kids to describe me, they’d go through a whole list of words before even thinking about Parkinson’s. And honestly, I don’t think about it that much either. I talk about it because it’s there, but it’s not my totality.

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.

In fact, Parkinson’s has made me a better person. A better husband, father and overall human being.

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.

The oldest form of theater is the dinner table. It’s got five or six people, new show every night, same players. Good ensemble; the people have worked together a lot.

I can’t always control my body the way I want to, and I can’t control when I feel good or when I don’t. I can control how clear my mind is. And I can control how willing I am to step up if somebody needs me.

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.

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?

By 21, I was earning six figures a week. By 23, I had a Ferrari. It was nuts.

Certainly people have a lot tougher situations than I’ve had to deal with. But I will say we are all dying from the moment we are born. This is not just rehearsal.

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.

My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.

After a year or so I really thought I was Howard Hughes. Here I was at eighteen years old, getting all these checks.

I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence I can reach for; perfection is God’s business.

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.

I’m not a shill for the Democratic Party.

The least amount of judging we can do, the better off we are.

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’.

I truly believe that we have infinite levels of power that we don’t even know are available to us.

Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there’s got to be a way through it.

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.

You’ve probably read in People that I’m a nice guy – but when the doctor first told me I had Parkinson’s, I wanted to kill him.

I love the irony. I’m perceived as being really young and yet I have the clinical condition of an old man.

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.