Top 50 Patrick Swayze Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true.”

— Patrick Swayze

Featured in: Surfing Quotes

2. “I’m not afraid of death. I’m going home.”

— Patrick Swayze

Featured in: Quotes About Home

3. “What winning is to me is not giving up, is no matter what’s thrown at me, I can take it. And I can keep going.”

— Patrick Swayze

4. “You know, I am a Leo. Lion is a giant part of me.”

— Patrick Swayze

5. “When you dance, things just go away, things don’t seem so bad.”

— Patrick Swayze

6. “I found that dance was key to keeping depression out of my life. When you dance, things just go away, things don’t seem so bad. There’s no better way to take care of health than through something as joyous and beautiful as dance.”

— Patrick Swayze

7. “Dance is the pure language of the soul – it’s been with us from the very beginning.”

— Patrick Swayze

8. “What’s powerful about a love scene is not seeing the act. It’s seeing the passion, the need, the desire, the caring, the fear.”

— Patrick Swayze

9. “Life sure has a sick sense of humor, doesn’t it?”

— Patrick Swayze

10. “Surfing’s the source. Can change your life. Swear to god.”

— Patrick Swayze

11. “Together we can make a world where cancer no longer means living with fear, without hope, or worse.”

— Patrick Swayze

12. “Pain don’t hurt.”

— Patrick Swayze

13. “I keep my heart and my soul and my spirit open to miracles.”

— Patrick Swayze

14. “All you have to do is follow three simple rules. One, never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected. Two, take it outside. Never start anything inside the bar unless it’s absolutely necessary. And three, be nice.”

— Patrick Swayze

15. “Feel what the wave is doing, then accept its energy.”

— Patrick Swayze

16. “As always, I appreciate all the love and support people have sent and continue to send my way.”

— Patrick Swayze

17. “The longer your life goes on, the more death you face.”

— Patrick Swayze

18. “Good-looking people turn me off. Myself included.”

— Patrick Swayze

19. “I don’t know what’s on the other side.”

— Patrick Swayze

20. “There are people who want me to do a cologne. They want to call it ‘Patrick.’ I was offered a fortune to make exercise videos. Posters, all kinds of stuff – something like $10 million worth. It’s insanity. I’m not going to do any of it.”

— Patrick Swayze

21. “When you are a pit bull, and you love what you do and you are going to continue to grow, that talent will find its way out.”

— Patrick Swayze

22. “Everything is designed to help you sell out.”

— Patrick Swayze

23. “Look at it! It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity, man! Let me go out there and let me get one wave, just one wave before you take me in. I mean, come on man, where I am I gonna go? Cliffs on both sides! I’m not gonna paddle my way to New Zealand! Come on, compadre. Come on!”

— Patrick Swayze

24. “If I leave this Earth, I want to leave this Earth just knowing I’ve tried to give something back and tried to do something worthwhile with myself.”

— Patrick Swayze

25. “The steps aren’t enough. Feel the music.”

— Patrick Swayze

26. “I will go so far as to say probably smoking had something to do with my pancreatic cancer.”

— Patrick Swayze

27. “One thing I’m not going to do is chase staying alive. You spend so much time chasing staying alive, you won’t live.”

— Patrick Swayze

28. “The way to screw up somebody’s life is to give them what they want.”

— Patrick Swayze

29. “You can imagine me as a kid growing up in redneck Texas with ballet shoes, tucking the violin under my arm. I had to fight my way up.”

— Patrick Swayze

30. “When it looks like I may live longer than five minutes I’ll drop cigarettes like a hot potato.”

— Patrick Swayze

31. “If I’m going to do television, I wanted that ‘North and South’ experience. I wanted something that’s going to challenge me on a constant basis.”

— Patrick Swayze

32. “I’m trying to shut up and let my angels speak to me and tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

— Patrick Swayze

33. “I thought it was all over. My lungs were filling with water and I began to black out. Then I saw an ancient warrior rise up out of the water. He said we’d make it, and we did. I believe we all have an angel watching us.”

— Patrick Swayze

34. “How do you nurture a positive attitude when all the statistics say you’re a dead man? You go to work.”

— Patrick Swayze

35. “I keep dreaming of a future, a future with a long and healthy life, not lived in the shadow of cancer but in the light.”

— Patrick Swayze

36. “There’s just something about dance. It’s like a primal thing in all of us.”

— Patrick Swayze

37. “Talent deserves to be honored. Hands deserve to be slapped if you do something stupid as well, but don’t take it too far.”

— Patrick Swayze

38. “I got completely fed up with that Hollywood blockbuster mentality. I couldn’t take it seriously any longer.”

— Patrick Swayze

39. “I am very, very clear on how difficult it is for a young kid out there to go into the arts without taking a lot of heat from his peers.”

— Patrick Swayze

40. “If you live through the initial stage of fame and get past it, and remember thats not who you are. If you live past that, then you have a hope of maybe learning how to spell the word artist.”

— Patrick Swayze

41. “I don’t want to be Mr. Romantic Leading Man. I don’t want to be the Dance Dude. I don’t want to be the Action Guy. If I had to do any one of those all my life, it’d drive me crazy.”

— Patrick Swayze

42. “You can’t be pregnant in leotards, and this is the last chance for us to get our bodies into the shape of concert dancers and capture it with the magic of film.”

— Patrick Swayze

43. “When people are away from home, they do things they might not normally do.”

— Patrick Swayze

44. “I don’t want to be a poster child for cancer.”

— Patrick Swayze

45. “I’ve never been one to run from a challenge.”

— Patrick Swayze

46. “To be honest, I’ve made a game out of trying to live through my James Dean, Janis Joplin, Freddie Prinze, Jim Morrison period, those demons that we all have that we’re either successful or not at making work for us rather than destroy us.”

— Patrick Swayze

47. “If anybody had that cure out there like so many people swear to me they do, you’d be two things: you’d be very rich, and you’d be very famous. Otherwise, shut up.”

— Patrick Swayze

48. “It just blows me away that I am on, I don’t know what generation of fans.”

— Patrick Swayze

49. “I found that dance was key to keeping depression out of my life.”

— Patrick Swayze

50. “Sometimes a movie encapsulates a period or a moment in all of our lives in such a way that it never dies.”

— Patrick Swayze