Michael J. Fox Quotes

The more I expect, the more unhappy I am going to be. The more I accept, the more serene I am.

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.

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.

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

Our challenges don’t define us, our actions do.

If you fixate on the worst-case scenario and it actually happens, you’ve lived it twice.

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

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.

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

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'm going to marry a Jewish woman because I like the idea of getting up Sunday morning and going to the deli.

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.

Pain is temporary, film is forever.

But the key to our marriage is the capacity to give each other a break. And to realize that it's not how our similarities work together; it's how our differences work together.

My experience is to deal with things through humor.

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

Happiness is a decision.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Don't spend a lot of time imagining the worst-case scenario. It rarely goes down as you imagine it will, and if by some fluke it does, you will have lived it twice.

If you allow for the possibilities of something better, you move toward it instinctively.

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

I urge you to be challenged and inspired by what you do not know.

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.

A creative mess is better than idle tidiness.

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.

Everything is cause and effect. If you don't move, nothing will move with you, and nothing will move toward you.

If you have one foot in yesterday and one foot in tomorrow, you're pissing all over today.

The oldest form of theater is the dinner table.

When life takes away, something of greater value is always given in return.

I think the scariest person in the world is the person with no sense of humor.

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.

I can get sad, I can get frustrated, I can get scared, but I never get depressed - because there's joy in my life.

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 happen to be a Parkinson's patient. I'm not fearful of my condition or my future - but if someone is looking in my eyes for fear, then they see their own fear reflected back at them.

Since I'm not sure of the address to which to send my gratitude, I put it out there in everything I do.

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.

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.

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.

Control is illusory. No matter what university you go to, no matter what degree you hold, if your goal is to becomes master of your own destiny, you have more to learn.

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

Do the right thing, and then do the next right thing, and that will lead you to the next right thing after that.

My age makes me think how valuable life is. How bad is something like Parkinson's in relation to not having life at all?

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

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.

Acceptance is the key to everything.

I've never gotten up to see something one of my kids wanted to show me and not been rewarded.