Top 200 Michael Caine Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.”

— Michael Caine

2. “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

— Michael Caine

3. “Do you know that the harder thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing? Nothing that has meaning is easy. “Easy” doesn’t enter into grown-up life.”

— Michael Caine

Featured in: Life is Hard Quotes, Growing Up Quotes

4. “When you reach the top, that’s when the climb begins.”

— Michael Caine

Featured in: Hiking Quotes

5. “Use the difficulties – if you can’t avoid them.”

— Michael Caine

6. “There’s only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch.”

— Michael Caine

7. “You’re never too old to be crazy.”

— Michael Caine

8. “Youre only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”

— Michael Caine

9. “You start pretending to have fun, you might have a little by accident.”

— Michael Caine

Featured in: Fun Quotes

10. “Obsession is a young man’s game.”

— Michael Caine

11. “You can write shorthand and still look at the guy you’re talking to.”

— Michael Caine

12. “Maybe its time we stop trying to avoid the truth and let it have its day.”

— Michael Caine

13. “A man’s body may grow old, but inside his spirit can still be as young and as restless as ever.”

— Michael Caine

14. “I never regret anything. I always said that when I’m old, I want to be sitting there regretting the things that I did and not the things that I didn’t do; and now I’m old, and I don’t regret anything! I had fun. I had fun, and I’m still having it.”

— Michael Caine

Featured in: Fun Quotes

15. “I’m not a betting man, and even if I was, I certainly wouldn’t bet on this! I would not bet on the Best Actor.”

— Michael Caine

16. “The basic rule of human nature is that powerful people speak slowly and subservient people quickly – because if they don’t speak fast enough, nobody will listen to them.”

— Michael Caine

17. “I have been rich and I have been poor. I know which one I prefer.”

— Michael Caine

18. “A man should dress in a way that you don’t notice. He looks good and you don’t know why. But it’s the tailoring, the materials, and the clothes.”

— Michael Caine

19. “Save your money. You’re going to need twice as much money in your old age as you think.”

— Michael Caine

20. “Theater acting is an operation with a scalpel, movie acting is an operation with a laser.”

— Michael Caine

21. “Do I believe in God? Yes I do. When you’ve had a life like mine, you have to.”

— Michael Caine

22. “It’s a lesson in life – don’t look back, you’ll trip over.”

— Michael Caine

23. “A lot of my best parts I’ve been the second choice for, so you never get too egotistical about anything.”

— Michael Caine

24. “I wouldn’t make an anti-American film. I’m one of the most pro-American foreigners I know. I love America and Americans.”

— Michael Caine

25. “Hey, I always say: if you want a quiet life, become a monk.”

— Michael Caine

26. “I come from the slums; I come from a hard background; I come from a poor family; and I was a soldier.”

— Michael Caine

27. “Books were my window on the world. Growing up at the Elephant and Castle, which was very rough, my paradise was the library.”

— Michael Caine

28. “I spent my entire time reading books and going to the cinema, just to escape.”

— Michael Caine

Featured in: Reading Quotes

29. “If someone is very upper-class, you have a stereotype of him which is probably true. If someone has a working-class accent, you have no idea who you’re talking to.”

— Michael Caine

30. “I had an extraordinary belief in myself. For years people told me to give it up and even though I was poverty- stricken, I never thought I should give it up.”

— Michael Caine

31. “To me, growing old is great. It’s the very best thing – considering the alternative.”

— Michael Caine

32. “In my day, the drug was alcohol and the weapon was a fist, so it was very sort of innocent and primitive. Now you’ve got drugs, guns, and knives, which are so lethal.”

— Michael Caine

33. “Age to me is in the mind. I’ve seen 70-year-olds who are already dead and 90-year-olds who can’t stop themselves living. I stay young by refusing to be old.”

— Michael Caine

34. “I’ve always got to have one impossible dream on the back burner.”

— Michael Caine

35. “If you’re an actor and you don’t act for a long time you sort of think, I wonder if I can still do it.”

— Michael Caine

36. “You’ve got to be flexible. Directors do a massive amount of planning and homework, and if after all that your director decides to throw it all out of the window and shoot spontaneously, then you must follow his lead.”

— Michael Caine

37. “I never listened to the people who said I should give it up, which is the main advice I got.”

— Michael Caine

38. “My mum never understood how much I earned. When I told her I earned a million pounds a film, she said, ‘How much is that?’”

— Michael Caine

39. “At age 11, I went to a Jewish school. I speak Yiddish. I’m Church of England Protestant. My father was Catholic, and my mother was Protestant. My wife is a Muslim.”

— Michael Caine

40. “No matter what the reason, if you start to scream and shout, you look a fool, and you feel a fool, and you earn the disrespect of everyone.”

— Michael Caine

41. “A lot of people said, Who do you think you are? I told them I know exactly who I am and I’ll tell you exactly where I’m going.”

— Michael Caine

42. “Sometimes, in a part, everything comes together.”

— Michael Caine

43. “To me, ‘Educating Rita’ is the most perfect performance I could give of a character who was as far away from me as you could possibly get and of all the films I have ever been in, I think it may be the one I am most proud of.”

— Michael Caine

44. “When it comes to politics, I believe you have to cut the cake so that everybody gets a piece, but at the same time, you have to keep in mind that somebody has to make the cake.”

— Michael Caine

45. “I was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite. Imagine signing that autograph! You’d get a broken arm. So I changed my name to Michael Caine after Humphrey Bogart’s ‘The Caine Mutiny,’ which was playing in the theater across from the telephone booth where I learned that I’d gotten my first TV job.”

— Michael Caine

46. “You don’t sacrifice your individuality; you sacrifice a lot of freedom.”

— Michael Caine

47. “My father was a fish market porter. So I grew up on fish, because he used to steal one a day, I grew up on the very best fish that money could buy, ’cause he only stole the good stuff.”

— Michael Caine

48. “Don’t sit as if you have nothing to say. You should be bursting with things to say. You just choose at this particular place and time, not to say them.”

— Michael Caine

49. “My closest friends are Roger Moore, who is an actor, Sean Connery, who is an actor, Terry O’Neill, who is a photographer, Johnny Gold, who was the boss of Tramp, and Leslie Bricusse, who is a composer.”

— Michael Caine

50. “When you are prepared, you are able to subdue your fear, control your nerves, channel your energy, and enter that state of highly alert relaxation that is spontaneity’s best friend.”

— Michael Caine