Top 160 Michael J. Fox Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Family is not an important thing. It’s everything.”

— Michael J. Fox

Featured in: Sunday Quotes, Happy Quotes, Caring Quotes, Family Quotes, Happy Thanksgiving Quotes

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

— Michael J. Fox

Featured in: Integrity Quotes, Recovery Quotes, Graduation Quotes, Quotes for Better Decisions, Conscience Quotes

3. “Happiness is a decision.”

— Michael J. Fox

4. “Acceptance is the key to everything.”

— Michael J. Fox

5. “I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God’s business.”

— Michael J. Fox

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

— Michael J. Fox

7. “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.”

— Michael J. Fox

8. “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.”

— Michael J. Fox

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

— Michael J. Fox

10. “Optimism is a cure for many things.”

— Michael J. Fox

11. “One’s dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but it can never be taken away unless it is surrendered.”

— Michael J. Fox

12. “Everything is cause and effect. If you don’t move, nothing will move with you, and nothing will move toward you.”

— Michael J. Fox

13. “Discipline is just doing the same thing the right way whether anyone’s watching or not.”

— Michael J. Fox

14. “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.”

— Michael J. Fox

15. “A creative mess is better than idle tidiness.”

— Michael J. Fox

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

— Michael J. Fox

17. “If you want to be an agent of change, it starts with you and what you’re made of.”

— Michael J. Fox

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

— Michael J. Fox

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

— Michael J. Fox

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

— Michael J. Fox

21. “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.”

— Michael J. Fox

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

— Michael J. Fox

23. “Whatever the situation, just take it for what it is. You don’t have to make it worse or better than it is. It just is what it is. Always deal with the honesty, the truth of what something is, and then you’ve got all kinds of choices.”

— Michael J. Fox

24. “There’s a rule in acting called, ‘Don’t play the result.’ If you have a character who’s going to end up in a certain place, don’t play that until you get there. Play each scene and each beat as it comes. And that’s what you do in life: You don’t play the result.”

— Michael J. Fox

25. “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.”

— Michael J. Fox

26. “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.”

— Michael J. Fox

27. “I have no choice about whether or not I have Parkinson’s. I have nothing but choices about how I react to it. In those choices, there’s freedom to do a lot of things in areas that I wouldn’t have otherwise found myself in.”

— Michael J. Fox

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

— Michael J. Fox

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

— Michael J. Fox

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

— Michael J. Fox

31. “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.”

— Michael J. Fox

32. “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.”

— Michael J. Fox

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

— Michael J. Fox

34. “I truly believe that we have infinite levels of power that we don’t even know are available to us.”

— Michael J. Fox

35. “People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there’s no water, they’ll drink the sand.”

— Michael J. Fox

36. “I think we all get our own bag of hammers. We all get our own Parkinson’s. We all have our own thing. I think that we’ll look at it through the filter of that experience, and we’ll say, “Yeah, I need to laugh at my stuff, too.””

— Michael J. Fox

37. “I see possibilities in everything. For everything that’s taken away, something of greater value has been given.”

— Michael J. Fox

38. “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.”

— Michael J. Fox

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

— Michael J. Fox

40. “The only thing that separates any one of us from excellence is fear and the opposite of fear is faith. I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence I can reach for, perfection is God’s business.”

— Michael J. Fox

41. “Pity is a benign form of abuse.”

— Michael J. Fox

42. “I can get sad, I can get frustrated, I can get scared, but I never get depressed – because there’s joy in my life.”

— Michael J. Fox

43. “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?”

— Michael J. Fox

44. “Ironic that in order to do my life’s work, I had to quit my day job.”

— Michael J. Fox

45. “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.”

— Michael J. Fox

46. “Pay attention to what’s happening around you. Read the book before you see the movie. Remember, though you, alone, are responsible for your own happiness, its still okay to feel responsible for someone else’s. Live and to learn.”

— Michael J. Fox

47. “I don’t want people to kick my ass, I just want to get to a point where they can’t kick it.”

— Michael J. Fox

48. “The oldest form of theater is the dinner table.”

— Michael J. Fox

49. “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.”

— Michael J. Fox

50. “My view of life is colored by humor and looking at the best in any situation.”

— Michael J. Fox