Top 40 Tom Shadyac Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I am part of a divine essence. I don’t have to become anything. I already am.”

— Tom Shadyac

2. “Simplicity. Simplicity. Simplicity. The three keys to a spiritual life.”

— Tom Shadyac

3. “Authenticity means to be the author of your own life.”

— Tom Shadyac

4. “Nothing in nature takes more than what it needs.”

— Tom Shadyac

5. “Death is not the enemy. A life lived without love is the enemy.”

— Tom Shadyac

6. “The solution begins with a deeper transformation that must occur in each of us. I AM isn’t as much about what you can do, as who you can be. And from that TRANSFORMATION OF BEING, action will naturally follow.”

— Tom Shadyac

7. “Love is the essential energy of the universe. It is the force that puts the stars in the firmament, and it makes the blood run through the veins.”

— Tom Shadyac

8. “I hope people start to look at their lives as the most powerful, creative act they will ever offer this world.”

— Tom Shadyac

9. “My dad’s half-Lebanese, my mom is full Lebanese. I’m three-quarters Lebanese. Irish-Lebanese.”

— Tom Shadyac

10. “I didn’t want to hear the usual answers about what’s wrong because I believe these are symptoms: global warming, genocide, hunger, poverty, war, environmental crisis. If we can identify the root cause, we can change our ways.”

— Tom Shadyac

11. “I love Frank Capra. He believed in the goodness of people and one man’s ability to fight and often triumph.”

— Tom Shadyac

12. “The bike accident caused me to start talking about spiritual truths. This accident – where I faced my own death – compelled me to talk about these truths and try to make a movie about them.”

— Tom Shadyac

13. “If you bounce a tennis ball against a wall it will come back to you the same way every time. But if you shift the wall a few degrees it will come back another way.”

— Tom Shadyac

14. “The way I think we were living is an invention. The truth is nobody can own anything. That was an unheard-of concept among indigenous people. We invented that.”

— Tom Shadyac

15. “You can’t sow an apple seed and expect to get an avocado tree. The consequences of your life are sown in what you do and how you behave.”

— Tom Shadyac

16. “Definition is the death of discovery.”

— Tom Shadyac

17. “I believe in unity, as opposed to division.”

— Tom Shadyac

18. “Hope is the belief we might get it done, and faith is the knowledge we will get it done.”

— Tom Shadyac

19. “I am operating under the philosophy that I will simply use what I need and the rest – even if I still have it somewhere – is not mine. It is others’. It is for the healing of the natural world. And it is in the process of returning.”

— Tom Shadyac

20. “We started by asking what’s wrong with the world, and we ended up discovering what’s right with it.”

— Tom Shadyac

21. “I was always kind of finding humor to be an access point to the conversation, to a pain relief, if you will. My mother was in a wheelchair since I was very young, so she was in pain and we used humor.”

— Tom Shadyac

22. “You send a message in everything you do, Im always very conscious about what ideas and what energy I put out there.”

— Tom Shadyac

23. “Theres one fundamental law that all of nature obeys that mankind breaks every day. Now, this is a law thats evolved over billions of years, and the law is this: Nothing in nature takes more than it needs.”

— Tom Shadyac

24. “If you look at the Bible as a whole, it’s redemptive and beautiful, and it’s God’s love story to mankind.”

— Tom Shadyac

25. “When an individual changes in even a small way he immediately changes the world around him. And that concentric circle moves out and changes everything.”

— Tom Shadyac

26. “Fear represents our need to hang on to the riverbank, to control outcomes, results, our lives; it swims upstream. Truth is about releasing that hold, letting go of results, and trusting the direction of Life’s current.”

— Tom Shadyac

27. “I think laughter is a sacred act.”

— Tom Shadyac

28. “Communism didn’t work because people weren’t ready for it, it was corrupt, and because it squelched individualism.”

— Tom Shadyac

29. “I wasn’t paying enough attention to what my heart was telling me. When I paid attention and got the message, I could move forward and heal.”

— Tom Shadyac

30. “Our culture does not teach us this, but what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas. If you cheat in Vegas, it comes right home with you. If you cheat in Vegas, you walk home as a cheater. You lie awake at a night a cheater. You cannot escape it.”

— Tom Shadyac

31. “I come from a family of lawyers. I was expected to be a professional of some sort, not an artist. I was never uplifted for my art.”

— Tom Shadyac

32. “I don’t have any interest in changing a system, because the system will simply get bucked back by people who haven’t changed.”

— Tom Shadyac

33. “Nature is an incredible cooperative. When things operate outside of that cooperative, they die off. It’s a very simple rule that nature operates under.”

— Tom Shadyac

34. “I don’t consider anything I’m doing as generous. In the new model of the world, I hope people will consider whatever I’m doing as just normal.”

— Tom Shadyac

35. “I have not walked away from Hollywood. I’m walking away from the way I personally did business in Hollywood. The budget of whatever movie I do needs to be efficient; it needs to consider what kind of resources we’re using and how to be as responsible as possible.”

— Tom Shadyac

36. “I was raised Catholic and didn’t like the dogma and exclusivity of that teaching but I was moved by the moral teachings and by the power of the Jesus fellow.”

— Tom Shadyac

37. “The one thing that advances a society is not technology or so-called development; its love – that one principle.”

— Tom Shadyac

38. “If we exchange bombs for bread there will be less reason for wanting to kill us. I just want to have the conversation.”

— Tom Shadyac

39. “What matters is who we are, not who we beat.”

— Tom Shadyac

40. “Illnesses are often times a reflection of an emotional place that needs healing or attention.”

— Tom Shadyac

41. “The mystics will tell you death is perfectly safe. A violent act will beget a violent act; it is simply a law.”

— Tom Shadyac

42. “I wasn’t big in the party scene but I did have an excessive lifestyle. I had much more than I needed. I think that was a manifestation of a certain kind of mental illness.”

— Tom Shadyac

43. “I’m from the Madeleine L’Engle school. The more she delves into science, the more she knows there’s a creator who’s behind these amazing laws, these amazing events. The symmetry of nature, the structure and order of it.”

— Tom Shadyac

44. “TRUTH: When a child believes he must win to be worthy, when young adults define themselves by what they do and not who they are, it is a kind of slavery a slave master would envy.”

— Tom Shadyac

45. “A redwood tree doesn’t take all of the soil’s nutrients; it just takes what it needs to grow. A lion doesn’t kill every gazelle, it just kills one. In fact, when the lion has fed, gazelles will go on grazing right in the lion’s midst. Why? Certainly, the lion could pounce again, but it doesn’t. Somehow, the lion naturally obeys this life-giving law of limits, a law that keeps nature in balance and keeps the delicate cycle upon which all of life depends intact.”

— Tom Shadyac

46. “No corporation has any power that people don’t give it. No government has any power that people don’t grant it. When people understand that corporations are a reflection of their own energy, and when they assume responsibility for that energy, corporate omnipotence will be seen for what it is, an illusion.”

— Tom Shadyac