Top 180 William Shatner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You might as well aim high. Why shoot yourself in the foot when you can shoot yourself in the head?”

— William Shatner

2. “You have to create your life. You have to carve it, like a sculpture.”

— William Shatner

3. “If saving money is wrong, I don’t want to be right!”

— William Shatner

4. “We meet aliens every day who have something to give us. They come in the form of people with different opinions.”

— William Shatner

5. “Any success I have had began by my showing up on time, being prepared, and doing the best possible job.”

— William Shatner

6. “I’ve got rock ‘n’ roll in my blood.”

— William Shatner

7. “Energy is the key to creativity. Energy is the key to life.”

— William Shatner

8. “The truth can’t be hidden for long.”

— William Shatner

9. “How do I stay so healthy and boyishly handsome? It’s simple. I drink the blood of young runaways.”

— William Shatner

10. “Pain and guilt can’t be taken away with the wave of a magic wand. They’re the things that we carry with us, they’re the things that make us what we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don’t want my pain taken away, I need my pain!”

— William Shatner

11. “I think you die the way you live.”

— William Shatner

12. “I did a movie in Esperanto.”

— William Shatner

13. “So bitcoin is cyber snob currency...”

— William Shatner

14. “Your cadence is your music.”

— William Shatner

15. “We’re all embers from the same fire. Our ember winks out, we’re ashes, we go back to the fire.”

— William Shatner

16. “I am curious about many things, and find the world around me, and the people and objects and things in it, equally fascinating. There is a great deal of that awe and wonder in me.”

— William Shatner

17. “Conquest is easy. Control is not.”

— William Shatner

18. “Divorce is probably as painful as death.”

— William Shatner

19. “A sense of the unknown has always lured mankind and the greatest of the unknowns of today is outer space. The terrors, the joys and the sense of accomplishment are epitomized in the space program.”

— William Shatner

20. “I’m surfing the giant life wave.”

— William Shatner

21. “Success should always be just beyond your grasp.”

— William Shatner

22. “Most people, including myself, keep repeating the same mistakes.”

— William Shatner

23. “I never watched ‘Star Trek.’”

— William Shatner

24. “The conundrum of free will and destiny has always kept me dangling.”

— William Shatner

25. “I have been accused of never saying no.”

— William Shatner

26. “A tree you pass by every day is just a tree. If you are to closely examine what a tree has and the life a tree has, even the smallest thing can withstand a curiosity, and you can examine whole worlds.”

— William Shatner

27. “It’s joy. And you should work on filling all your years with as much joy as possible. Even.”

— William Shatner

28. “There’s too many people in the world.”

— William Shatner

29. “Has it ever occurred to you that how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life?”

— William Shatner

30. “What does God need with a starship?”

— William Shatner

31. “Writing is truly a creative art – putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.”

— William Shatner

32. “I love the concept of togetherness and the entwinement of marriage.”

— William Shatner

33. “What is down will go up. At the same time, you have to be prepared for what is up to go down.”

— William Shatner

34. “The possibilities that are suggested in quantum physics tell us that everything that we’re looking at may not be in fact there, so the underlying nature of being is weird.”

— William Shatner

35. “My dad died of a stroke.”

— William Shatner

36. “Don’t be afraid of taking chances, of striking out along paths that are untrod. Don’t be afraid of failing. Don’t be afraid of making an ass of yourself. I do it all the time – and look what I got.”

— William Shatner

37. “I love the musicality of words.”

— William Shatner

38. “I don’t understand the concept of retirement. It’s not a bad thing to savor your memories, it can be wonderful and warming, but not at the cost of losing your excitement about the future.”

— William Shatner

39. “But most people are too busy working on survival to find the opportunity to create.”

— William Shatner

40. “I think the supernatural is a catch-all for everything we don’t understand about the vast other parts of life that we cannot perceive.”

— William Shatner

41. “I’ve never been without a dog. I’ve made trips across the country with a dog. I’ve been in that angst of loneliness, where you’re really alone in the universe, except for the dog.”

— William Shatner

42. “I’m not out to convince anybody of anything.”

— William Shatner

43. “I’ve discovered that the more freedom I have to be creative, the more creative I become.”

— William Shatner

44. “You have to continuously fail. You fail at something, then you get over it, then you fail some more. And after you fail, there’s always something new there. And that something new can be really interesting.”

— William Shatner

45. “If we can clean up our world, I’ll bet you we can achieve warp drive.”

— William Shatner

46. “Never buy anything that eats while you sleep.”

— William Shatner

47. “The mysteriousness and mystique of space is such, that science fiction attempts to tantalize you by telling you a story that could possibly be out there and that’s the appeal of science fiction.”

— William Shatner

48. “Stop and smell the garlic! That’s all you have to do.”

— William Shatner

49. “A true pilot must of necessity pay attention to the seasons, the heavens, the stars, the winds, and everything proper to the craft if he is really to rule a ship.”

— William Shatner

50. “I’m so not ready to die. It petrifies me. I go alone. I go to a place I don’t know. It might be painful. It might be the end. My thought is that it is the end. I become nameless, and I spent a lifetime being known.”

— William Shatner