Top 120 Tom Hanks Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great.”

— Tom Hanks

Featured in: Persistence Quotes, Excellence Quotes, Passion Quotes, Quotes About Work, Honesty Quotes

2. “Houston, we have a problem.”

— Tom Hanks

3. “I know what I have to do now, I’ve got to keep breathing because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?”

— Tom Hanks

4. “Believing is seeing and seeing is believing.”

— Tom Hanks

Featured in: Famous Movie Quotes

5. “Dear God, thank you for my life. I forgot how big and wonderful it is.”

— Tom Hanks

6. “Shake it off and move on.”

— Tom Hanks

7. “If things were easy to find, they wouldn’t be worth finding.”

— Tom Hanks

8. “Life is like a box of choclates. You never know what you goanna get.”

— Tom Hanks

9. “I’m not a smart man, but I know what love is.”

— Tom Hanks

10. “Never give up because you never know what the tide will bring in the next day.”

— Tom Hanks

11. “Saying no to something is actually much more powerful than saying yes.”

— Tom Hanks

12. “A hero is somebody who voluntarily walks into the unknown.”

— Tom Hanks

13. “Are you crying? There’s no crying. There’s no crying in baseball.”

— Tom Hanks

14. “The only way you can truly control how you are seen is by being honest all the time.”

— Tom Hanks

15. “It’s not a mid-life crisis. It’s a mid-life disaster. A mid-life crisis is when you wake up with everything and you go “I have everything but I’m still unhappy.””

— Tom Hanks

16. “I think it’s better to feel good than to look good.”

— Tom Hanks

17. “For some people, I will be Forrest Gump for the rest of my life. But that’s OK; that’s a good thing.”

— Tom Hanks

18. “There’s a difference between solitude and loneliness. I can understand the concept of being a monk for a while.”

— Tom Hanks

19. “Help, and you will make a huge impact in the life of the street, the town, the country and our planet. If only one out of four of each one hundred of you choose to help on any given day, in any given cause, incredible things will happen in the world you live in.”

— Tom Hanks

20. “I have high blood sugars, and Type 2 diabetes is not going to kill me. But I just have to eat right, and exercise, and lose weight, and watch what I eat, and I will be fine for the rest of my life.”

— Tom Hanks

21. “Mama always said, dying was a part of life. I sure wish it wasn’t.”

— Tom Hanks

22. “Some people go to bed at night thinking, ‘That was a good day.’ I am one of those who worries and asks, ‘How did I screw up today?’”

— Tom Hanks

23. “The power of the individual is as powerful as the universe is infinite.”

— Tom Hanks

24. “Everybody has something that chews them up and, for me, that thing was always loneliness. The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are.”

— Tom Hanks

25. “We are still in the position of waking up and having a choice. Do I make the world better today somehow, or do I not bother?”

— Tom Hanks

26. “From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It’s not a miracle; we just decided to go.”

— Tom Hanks

27. “Larger-than-life characters make up about .01 percent of the world’s population.”

— Tom Hanks

28. “This is what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination.”

— Tom Hanks

29. “In the 1998 Oscars, I found myself in the bathroom in a stall, next to Tom Selleck. So I leaned over and I said ’looks like we’re a couple of peeing Toms. His angry silence is something I’ll never forget.”

— Tom Hanks

30. “What we’re doing with Band of Brothers is trying to put it into human terms, so it is not just a flickering, black and white myth on a screen, it is a resonant story. I want the audience to recognize themselves in these men. They’re not just mythic heroes.”

— Tom Hanks

31. “I am who I am, and I think I have a good nature, by and large. But if someone takes advantage of that good nature, well then, you know, I’m not that nice a guy.”

— Tom Hanks

32. “When you try to bring a story to life, it starts in your head and you see possibilities for it, but it’s just one damn thing after another.”

— Tom Hanks

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

33. “But the battles against loneliness that I fought when I was 16 are very different from those I fought when I was 27, and those are very different from the ones I fight at 44.”

— Tom Hanks

34. “I come from the school of That Horse is Not Dead.”

— Tom Hanks

35. “My doctor said, ‘If you can weigh what you weighed in high school, you’ll essentially be healthy and not have Type 2 diabetes.’ Well, I’m gonna have Type 2 diabetes, because there is no way I can weigh as much as I did in high school.”

— Tom Hanks

36. “The truth is that everyone pays attention to who’s number one at the box office. And none of it matters, because the only thing that really exists is the connection the audience has with a movie.”

— Tom Hanks

37. “You cannot look up at the night sky on the Planet Earth and not wonder what it’s like to be up there amongst the stars. And I always look up at the moon and see it as the single most romantic place within the cosmos.”

— Tom Hanks

38. “College isn’t necessary for everybody and it’s only from what you put into it what you go there for.”

— Tom Hanks

39. “The prejudice surrounding AIDS exacts a social death which precedes the actual physical one.”

— Tom Hanks

40. “I love my family and I love my kids, but when the moments come, it’s not as though you can just substitute your own life with what you’re doing on film. You have to go to some other place where it’s bigger than your own life.”

— Tom Hanks

41. “My favorite traditional Christmas movie that I like to watch is All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s just not December without that movie in my house.”

— Tom Hanks

42. “I don’t follow football, I just love the name Aston Villa. Here in England you have other footballing entities like Manchester and Arsenal and Chelsea.”

— Tom Hanks

43. “Yeah! I got type-two diabetes! I’m sure there’s going to be some media scandal now, saying I got it because I gained and lost weight for movie parts or something – but I doubt that.”

— Tom Hanks

44. “You have to adhere to a philosophy that the life unexamined is not worth living, because otherwise you’re just living from day to day and you don’t have any real sense of yourself or where you are.”

— Tom Hanks

45. “Mama always had a way of explaining things so I could understand them.”

— Tom Hanks

46. “Prior to Saving Private Ryan I never worked with men. I was always working with some babe, and it was always about falling in love, and it just got turned around. I’m not looking for any particular kind of story. I wait until it comes across my desk.”

— Tom Hanks

47. “When I was 21 years old, I had a job playing Santa Claus in a shopping centre in Sacramento. I was rail thin, so it’s not like I was a traditional Santa Claus even then. I had a square stomach; that was the shape of the sofa cushion that I had stuffed into my pants.”

— Tom Hanks

48. “Even the simplest choice can make a jaw-dropping difference in our world.”

— Tom Hanks

49. “I think 80 percent of the population are really great, caring people who will help you and tell you the truth. That’s just the way it is. And I think 20 percent of the population are crooks and liars. It’s just a fact.”

— Tom Hanks

50. “The nature of the movies is different than it was five years ago, and they’re all driven by the possibilities of CGI, which means you can make anything happen on screen that you can possibly desire.”

— Tom Hanks