Michael J. Fox Quotes

Happiness is a decision.

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 know what I want? The answer is, I truly don't know what I want. I don't want to do a television series. I want to do dramas as well as comedies, but I have no idea what kind or in what order. Just give me the chance at them.

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.

If you want to be an agent of change, it starts with you and what you're made of.

As with any turning point or instance when a new road is chosen and an old one forsaken, there are consequences.

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

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.

You suffer the blow, but you capitalize on the opportunity left in its wake.

Discipline is just doing the same thing the right way whether anyone's watching or not.

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

Disease is a non-partisan problems that requires a non-partisan solution.

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.

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

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

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 I started it [non for profit], I thought, I'm not smart enough to do this. I had no experience in management, no experience in administration, no experience in nonprofit; but then this phrase came into my head: I only have to be smart enough to find people who are smarter than me; I only have to be smart enough to recognize who knows more than me.

There are things I've always wanted to do. Things I may not be able to do, but I never really ruled them out - like running a marathon. It's all a matter of timing for me. I suppose I could probably do it if I planned it out right with medication. 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.

If you were to rush into this room right now and announce that you had struck a deal - with God, Allah, Buddha, Christ, Krishna, Bill Gates, whomever - in which the ten years since my diagnosis could be magically taken away, traded in for ten more years as the person I was before - I would, without a moment's hesitation, tell you to take a hike.

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

It’s all about control. Control is illusory. No matter what university you go to, no matter what degree you hold, if your goal is to become master of your own destiny, you have more to learn. Parkinson’s is a perfect metaphor for lack of control. Every unwanted movement in my hand or arm, every twitch that I cannot anticipate or arrest, is a reminder that even in the domain of my own being, I am not calling the shots. I tried to exert control by drinking myself to a place of indifference, which just exacerbated the sense of miserable hopelessness.

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

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?

The oldest form of theater is the dinner table.

They did something once that slurred my speech, and I thought, "Oh, man, you're messing with my brain. It's freaking me out."

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.

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.

I got sick of turning on the TV and seeing my face.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's an idea I came across a few years ago that I love: My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance and in inverse proportion to my expectations. That's the key for me. If I can accept the truth of 'This is what I'm facing - not what can I expect but what I am experiencing now' - then I have all this freedom to do other things.

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

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 think there's a God and I know it's not me. I don't have a set of tenets, but I live an ethical life.

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.

Pity is a benign form of abuse.

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.

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'.

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

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

I don't think [Parkinson's] is Gothic nastiness. There's nothing on the surface that's horrible about someone with a shaky hand. There's nothing horrible about someone in their life saying, "God, I'm really tired of this shaky hand thing" and me saying, "Me, too." That's our reality. We have no control over it.

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

The story is a testament to the consolations that get me through and give meaning to every area of my life.

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

It is ironic that in the same year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA, some would have us ban certain forms of DNA medical research. Restricting medical research has very real human consequences, measured in loss of life and tremendous suffering for patients and their families.