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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
![[My son] will have a fairly stable future. Not one where the schoolyard talk is whose father grossed $8 million on his last picture.](https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/images/quotes/michael-j-fox-139369.jpg)
[My son] will have a fairly stable future. Not one where the schoolyard talk is whose father grossed $8 million on his last picture.
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.
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.
You know you're old when you get a lifetime achievement award. It's a message you've been around too long.
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.
The story is a testament to the consolations that get me through and give meaning to every area of my life.
So I never spend a lot of time analyzing why people respond to my work. But I think that it's just the joy, a passion for life, that I think has always been in my characters. Beyond that, I'm just grateful for it.
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'.
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.
No matter how much fame you have, it's not something that belongs to you. If I'm famous, that doesn't belong to me-that belongs to you. If you can't remember who I am, I'm no longer famous.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Life is what you put into it and how much you take out of it. You put in more than is expected, and you take out less than you want.
My age makes me think how valuable life is. How bad is something like Parkinson's in relation to not having life at all?
One's dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but cannot be taken away unless it is surrendered.
My whole life, meeting people is like a blind date, because I feel like they've already seen the video on me.
Since I'm not sure of the address to which to send my gratitude, I put it out there in everything I do.
My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.
If one of my kids reads a book for school and I can have a conversation with her about the book and I sense that she gets what the book is about, then it doesn't really matter to me if she gets an A on the paper.
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.
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.
If Spirituality is that you're humble in the face of forces greater than you and you believe those forces are more inclined toward being good than being bad, then I'm a spiritual person.
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.
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.
I wait for good opportunities to come up to do stuff; I'm not seeking things. I'm quite busy in the meantime, but if the right thing came up, I would be happy to do it.
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.
I was eccentric, even as a kid. I was an early reader, an early talker. I was very curious in a way that maybe the other kids weren't. I was a little more outgoing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 think I benefited from being equal parts ambitious and curious. And of the two, curiosity has served me best.
I see possibilities in everything. For everything that's taken away, something of greater value has been given.
I'm going to marry a Jewish woman because I like the idea of getting up Sunday morning and going to the deli.
I love the irony. I'm perceived as being really young and yet I have the clinical condition of an old man.
I'm glad I don't have a drinking problem,' I confided, 'because I don't think I'd ever be able to quit.
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.
In fact, Parkinson's has made me a better person. A better husband, father and overall human being.
I truly believe that we have infinite levels of power that we don't even know are available to us.
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.
I don't feel a yearning or a sense of missed opportunities. I don't have many regrets. So that's a nice feeling. To have no regrets and still have enough sense of adventure to take on risk.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I discovered that I was part of a Parkinson's community with similar experiences and similar questions that I'd been dealing with alone.
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 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 don't keep up with it all. But Taylor Swift writes songs about everybody she goes out with, right? What a way to build a career.
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.
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.
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 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.
After a year or so I really thought I was Howard Hughes. Here I was at eighteen years old, getting all these checks.
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 am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence I can reach for; perfection is God's business.
Everything is cause and effect. If you don't move, nothing will move with you, and nothing will move toward you.
Do the right thing, and then do the next right thing, and that will lead you to the next right thing after that.
As with any turning point or instance when a new road is chosen and an old one forsaken, there are consequences.
By the time I entered high school, I had forsaken academics altogether in favor of my burgeoning acting career.
I worked very hard on those movies but there was some creative connection that wasn't being made.
The more I expect, the more unhappy I am going to be. The more I accept, the more serene I am.
I've never gotten up to see something one of my kids wanted to show me and not been rewarded.
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.
I don't want people to kick my ass, I just want to get to a point where they can't kick it.
If you fixate on the worst-case scenario and it actually happens, you’ve lived it twice.
If you allow for the possibilities of something better, you move toward it instinctively.
I don't look at life as a battle or as a fight. I don't think I'm scrappy. I'm accepting.
He gave life to the breath- oxygen, a simple gas, he transferred into words, ideas, hope.
Just as Parkinson's isn't a big topic of conversation in my house, neither is my career.
Discipline is just doing the same thing the right way whether anyone's watching or not.
The only thing worse than an opportunity you don't deserve is blowing an opportunity.
If you want to be an agent of change, it starts with you and what you're made of.
I don't look at myself as a leader. I do look at myself as part of a community.
When I was 20, I would have taken a bullet in the head to never have to be 35.
I think the scariest person in the world is the person with no sense of humor.
My wife is Jewish, and therefore, it's my children's birthright to be Jewish.
My view of life is colored by humor and looking at the best in any situation.
By 21, I was earning six figures a week. By 23, I had a Ferrari. It was nuts.
You suffer the blow, but you capitalize on the opportunity left in its wake.
When life takes away, something of greater value is always given in return.
