Top 120 Jesse Eisenberg Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Don’t be a hero, live to fight another day.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

2. “First rule of magic? Always be the smartest guy in the room.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

3. “Poor people are gross and they ’smell bad.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

4. “No compliment is ever sufficient and every insult, of course, is true.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

5. “Devils don’t come from hell beneath us, they come from the sky.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

6. “The more people say nice things about me, the more I feel it’s false.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

7. “I think I’m an abstinence symbol. If I take my shirt off, people will not have babies.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

8. “Every character I play has to be the hero of his own story, the way we’re all heroes of our own lives.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

9. “Everyone’s a geek in some way or other. Everyone’s an outsider.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

10. “I think I prioritize other people’s opinions of me very highly, which is not necessarily a good thing – it’s a thing that causes a lot of anxiety.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

11. “All of my pleasures are guilty, but that’s just the way I’m wired.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

12. “Depression, if it’s an unconsciously elected experience, is a luxury.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

13. “When cellphones came out, my girlfriend refused to get one for five years, because she thought it would turn her into somebody who couldn’t connect with other people – and, of course, she got a cellphone.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

14. “Mother Teresa was asked what was the meaning of life, and she said to help other people, and I thought, ‘What a strange thing to say’ – but maybe it’s the right thing to say.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

15. “I’ve never had tastes of people my own age. All of my friends when I was 15 were in their 40s. I’m not actually mature, just very self-conscious around people my own age because I feel like I’m supposed to act the same way they act and I don’t know how.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

16. “The only way to be turned off to being famous is to be famous.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

17. “I write all the time because I’m lonely. When you’re acting, you’re working every day all day. But then you have long amounts of time off.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

18. “I can’t watch myself in interviews. I feel like I look like a wreck. My mom is always calling me and going, ‘Stop fidgeting,’ and it’s like, ‘You have no idea what it’s like, Mom.’”

— Jesse Eisenberg

19. “I’m kind of shocked any time somebody hires me and even more shocked any time somebody hires me to play a character like Lex Luthor, which I only knew from the public consciousness of him being a bald, brooding villain who is older than me.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

20. “It’s really hard to copy another actor and be successful. In fact, that’s usually the reason people are not good, because they’re copying something they’ve seen, but, for some reason with their face and their body, it doesn’t work.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

21. “Acting is kind of difficult to intellectualize – it’s a far more visceral experience. It’s really hard to be able to think about and then employ these kind of esoteric notions of this person’s backstory and try to weave it in somehow. It’s just kind of impossible.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

22. “I don’t follow sports that much now, but I was a Phoenix Suns fanatic in the early ’90s.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

23. “But kids think differently than adults think. Adults have spent so many years thinking more and more like each other because the more you live with other people the less you think like yourself and the more you think like them. But kids are new people so we still think more normally.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

24. “If you went to Harvard Medical School, chances are you’ll be a doctor at some place. There’s a career trajectory. Acting, there’s nothing. It’s constantly trying to procure jobs – it’s very disconcerting.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

25. “I am actually going to two therapists right now. I don’t know, I actually feel like therapy has just made me more uncomfortable.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

26. “The joy of acting for me is to be able to experience emotions in a safe environment. You can’t scream and cry in the street because everybody will look. If you do it on a movie set, you get applauded.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

27. “People ask me what my hobbies are in interviews, and I always say biking. But all I bike for is to get to rehearsal more quickly.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

28. “I grew up in a secular suburban Jewish household where we only observed the religion on very specific times like a funeral or a Bar Mitzvah.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

29. “I always think the second worst thing in the world is to go on stage at night, and the first worst thing in the world is sitting at home at night. For me, it’s scarier to not be doing it than doing it.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

30. “Acting is a weird profession. It’s very disquieting, and at the time it just made me so confused. It’s only when you step away from a movie for several weeks or months that you start to put things in perspective.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

31. “If I get no sleep the night before a show, I feel that performance is the best one.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

32. “Because going through a hard life with someone else is better than going through an easy life alone.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

33. “I often think if you have time to sit around the house feeling bad for yourself, you have time to tutor a child. I’m guilty of that exact thing. I will spend more time sitting around feeling bad for myself than actually helping somebody.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

34. “I live in New York City, where, if you’re in a movie at a popular independent theater, you think you’re king of the world, because you’re in a bubble. So there’s no way for me to properly conceive of the attention that the movie gets in a way that doesn’t make me confused.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

35. “I tend to be pessimistic about everything: If things seem to be going good, I’m worried that it’s going to end; if things are bad, then I’m worried that it’s going to be permanent. It’s not a very comfortable attitude to have all the time.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

36. “I feel things can always be funny, but that’s probably because I have some kind of leftover childhood need to make people laugh. For somebody like me, that’s the thing you excel at.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

37. “People think, ‘You’re an actor, you can afford clothes,’ but I just try to take the clothes from the movie, which makes the selecting of film projects that much more difficult, because you try to play characters that might wear something you’d want to wear.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

38. “I like driving; I don’t drive since I live in New York. I don’t have an opportunity to drive, like, ever.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

39. “Acting forces me to socialise, which is good for me, I think.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

40. “I always thought Woody Harrelson is quite a persuasive guy. He’s the kind of guy who can call you up in the middle of the night and tell you, ‘Let’s all go get a donut!’ And you’re thinking, ‘It’s the middle of the night,’ but somehow you still get up and go get a donut.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

41. “And I wanted to ask her if she only took me around so that Dad would pay for her but I already knew the answer: Mom took me around because she needed me. Because going through a hard life with someone else is better than going through an easy life alone.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

42. “In ‘Zombieland,’ it was such a freewheeling plot it almost didn’t matter what the characters were doing scene to scene as long as there was a consistent banter.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

43. “I find it very difficult to do normal things without getting approached.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

44. “I get very homesick, but otherwise it’s a great privilege to get to travel for work.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

45. “As an actor, you are in a unique position because you’re not only memorizing dialogue but really embodying it. You naturally feel the rhythm of good writing.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

46. “When you’re acting in a movie, you never consider the reception of it. It’s impossible to predict how something will be received. Even if you think it’s the greatest thing in the world, other people might not like it. Or agree with it.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

47. “Look, I don’t have a Facebook page because I have little interest in hearing myself talk about myself any further than I already do in interviews or putting any more about myself online than there already is. But if I wasn’t in this position, I’m sure I would use it every day.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

48. “My job when I’m acting in a movie is very limited to playing a role. I’m not evaluating somebody. I’m only evaluating them insofar as they’re interacting with me, but I’m not evaluating their skill set and I don’t watch the movies, so I’m not aware of the way they’re putting things together.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

49. “It’s a very strange experience to watch yourself in a movie anyway. I most frequently don’t do it, but if I was going to do it, I would do it in a private way, not at a public screening at a film festival, which is just an overwhelming experience.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

50. “I don’t concern myself with thinking ahead to the finished product. I focus more specifically on what the character is experiencing. Once you relieve yourself of the very arbitrary and always punishing pressure of what an audience is expecting you to do, acting becomes a lot more fun and pure.”

— Jesse Eisenberg

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