45 Motivational Alan Alda Quotes For Success In Life

Alan Alda is an American actor, director, screenwriter, comedian, and author. A six-time Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award winner, he played Hawkeye Pierce in the war television series M*A*S*H. Alan Alda quotes will motivate you.

Best Alan Alda Quotes

1. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself. ~ Alan Alda
2. Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart. ~ Alan Alda
3. Laugh at yourself, but don’t ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don’t leave any of yourself safely onshore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory. ~ Alan Alda

4. Originality is an unexplored territory. You get there by carrying a canoe – you can’t take a taxi. ~ Alan Alda Quotes

5. life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it; … it is up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something it’s as though you aren’t there. ~ Alan Alda
6. Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is really advice to myself, a reminder to myself not to avoid change or uncertainty, but to go with it, to surf into change. ~ Alan Alda
7. The best things said come last. People will talk for hours saying nothing much and then linger at the door with words that come with a rush from the heart. ~ Alan Alda
8. Listening is being able to be changed by the other person. ~ Alan Alda, Alan Alda quotes on listening
9. People who laugh together generally don’t kill each other. ~ Alan Alda
10. Life is great-I wouldn’t know what I’d do without it. ~ Alan Alda
11. Don’t be upset that it takes a long, long time to find wisdom because nobody knows where wisdom can be found. It tends to break out at unexpected times like a rare virus and mostly people with compassion and understanding are susceptible to it. ~ Alan Alda

12. Be brave enough to live creatively. ~ Alan Alda

13. No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle, and good, without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness. ~ Alan Alda
14. Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in. ~ Alan Alda
15. The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed. Eventually, I found a radical way of thinking about listening. Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. When I’m willing to let them change me, something happens between us that’s more interesting than a pair of dueling monologues. ~ Alan Alda
16. Whenever you wonder about yourself, look up at the stars swirling around in the heavens and just realize how tiny and puny they are. They’re supposed to be gigantic explosions and they’re just these insignificant little dots. If you step back from things far enough you realize how important and powerful you are. ~ Alan Alda

17. Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been. ~ Alan Alda

18. Our lives depend on good communication. Good communication helps personal relationships, it helps bosses and employees get along better. We rely on it. ~ Alan Alda
19. I’m an angry person, angrier than most people would imagine, I get flashes of anger. What works for me is working out when it’s useful to use that anger. ~ Alan Alda
20. I found I wasn’t asking good enough questions because I assumed I knew something. I would box them into a corner with a badly formed question, and they didn’t know how to get out of it. Now, I let them take me through it step by step, and I listen. ~ Alan Alda
21. Laugh at yourself, but don’t ever aim your doubt at yourself. ~ Alan Alda
22. It’s really clear to me that you can’t hang onto something longer than its time. Ideas lose a certain freshness, ideas have a shelf life, and sometimes they have to be replaced by other ideas. ~ Alan Alda
23. How can I ever hope to communicate something to you unless I get signals back from you that I’m on the right track or that I’ve started at someplace that you’re familiar with? ~ Alan Alda
24. Republicans are as capable of coming up with great ideas and moving this country along as anyone – they just don’t do it. ~ Alan Alda

25. If I can’t get the girl, at least give me more money. ~ Alan Alda

26. I was a child, and my mother was psychotic. She loved me, but I didn’t really feel I had a mother. And when you live with somebody who is paranoid and thinks you’re trying to kill them all the time, you tend to feel a little betrayed. ~ Alan Alda
27. artists try to say things that can’t be said. in a fragile net of words, gestures, or colors, we hope to capture a feeling; a taste; a painful longing. but the net is always too porous, and we are left with the sweet frustration of almost knowing, which is teasingly pleasurable. ~ Alan Alda
28. I’ll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I’ll even ‘hari-kari’ if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun! ~ Alan Alda
29. If you don’t listen deeply, the connection won’t take place…. [You have to be] willing to be changed by the person you’re listening to, where you’re not just waiting for a pause so you can say your thing, but you’re actually letting them have an effect on you if they can. ~ Alan Alda

30. It isn’t necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It’s only necessary to be rich. ~ Alan Alda

31. I have thought about punching people out. Sometimes, I’ve thought, ‘Why don’t I just act on that impulse?’ But then, I’ve never hit anybody in anger. Hey! I’ve never hit anybody for fun. ~ Alan Alda
32. Here’s my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they’re fair with you. ~ Alan Alda
33. It’s too bad I’m not as wonderful a person as people say I am, because the world could use a few people like that. ~ Alan Alda
34. I still don’t like the word agnostic. It’s too fancy. I’m simply not a believer. But, as simple as this notion is, it confuses some people. Someone wrote a Wikipedia entry about me, identifying me as an atheist because I’d said in a book I wrote that I wasn’t a believer. I guess in a world uncomfortable with uncertainty, an unbeliever must be an atheist, and possibly an infidel. This gets us back to that most pressing of human questions: why do people worry so much about other people’s holding beliefs other than their own? ~ Alan Alda
35. I used to be a Catholic. I left because I object to conversion by concussion. If you don’t agree with what they teach, you get clobbered over the head until you do. All that does is change the shape of the head. ~ Alan Alda

36. When people are laughing, they’re generally not killing one another. ~ Alan Alda

37. When I started out as an actor, I thought, Here’s what I have to say; how shall I say it? I began to understand that what I do in the scene is not as important as what happens between me and the other person. And listening is what lets it happen. It’s almost always the other person who causes you to say what you say next. You don’t have to figure out how you’ll say it. You have to listen so simply, so innocently, that the other person brings about a change in you that makes you say it and informs the way you say it. ~ Alan Alda
38. I’ve been lucky enough to live through all the things that are supposed to give meaning to our lives, like parenting, grandparenting, art, celebrity. ~ Alan Alda
39. All these things you expect meaning to come from, and sometimes it comes when you’re not expecting it. ~ Alan Alda
40. For a while in my teens, I was sure I had it. It was about getting to heaven. If heaven existed and lasted forever, then a mere lifetime spent scrupulously following orders was a small investment for an infinite payoff. One day, though, I realized I was no longer a believer, and realizing that I couldn’t go back. ~ Alan Alda

41. As I am becoming older, the only thing that speeds up is time. ~ Alan Alda

42. When I studied how to think in school, I was taught that the first rule of logic was that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect. That last note, “in the same respect,” says a lot. As soon as you change the frame of reference, you’ve changed the truthiness of a once immutable fact. ~ Alan Alda
43. Be brave enough to live creatively . . . what you’ll discover will be wonderful: yourself. ~ Alan Alda
44. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won’t come in. If you challenge your own, you won’t be so quick to accept the unchallenged assumptions of others. You’ll be a lot less likely to be caught up in bias or prejudice or be influenced by people who ask you to hand over your brains, your soul or your money because they have everything all figured out for you.
    The good thing about being a hypocrite is that you get to keep your values. ~ Alan Alda
45. If you know what you’re looking for, that’s all you’ll get – what’s previously known. But when you’re open to what’s possible, you get something new – that’s creativity. ~ Alan Alda, Alan Alda quotes on creativity

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