Marlon Brando Jr. was an American actor and film director with a career spanning 60 years, during which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice. He is regarded as arguably the greatest and most influential actor in the 20th-century film. These Marlon Brando quotes will motivate you.
Best Marlon Brando Quotes
- “Regret is useless in life. It’s in the past. All we have is now.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “Only the one who walks his own way can’t be overtaken.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “Never surrender to the momentum of mediocrity.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “Never confuse the size of your paycheck with the size of your talent.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “Acting, in general, is something most people think they’re incapable of, but they do it from morning to night. The subtlest acting I’ve ever seen is by ordinary people trying to show they feel something they don’t, or trying to hide something. It’s something everyone learns at an early age.” ~ Marlon Brando
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“All I want to be is normally insane.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “Every time you get knocked down you get up stronger.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “If we are not our brother’s keeper, at least let us not be his executioner.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalized, develop scabs, never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything because you always feel to much.” ~ Marlon Brando
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“Too much success can ruin you as surely as too much failure.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “People will like you who never met you, they think you’re absolutely wonderful; and then people also will hate you, for reasons that have nothing to do with any real experience with you. People don’t want to lose their enemies. We have favorite enemies, people we love to hate and we hate to love. If they do something good, we don’t like it. I found myself doing that with Ronald Reagan. He is anathema to me. If he does something that’s reasonable, I find my mind trying to find some way to interpret it so that it’s not reasonable, so that somewhere it’s jingoist extremism.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “Nobody “becomes” a character. You can’t act unless you are who you are.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “It really don’t matter what you’re thinking about, as long as you’re thinking about something.” ~ Marlon Brando
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“Most of the successful people in Hollywood are failures as human beings.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “An actor must interpret life, and in order to do so he must be willing to accept all experiences that life can offer.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “Hey, you wanna hear my philosophy of life? Do it to him before he does it to you.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “I suppose the story of my life is a search for love, but more than that, I have been looking for a way to repair myself from the damages I suffered early on and to define my obligation, if I had any, to myself and my species.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts. Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we’re acting. Most people do it all day long.” ~ Marlon Brando
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“We only have so many faces in our pockets” ~ Marlon Brando
- “Tell me, do you spend time with your family? Good. Because a man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “I value each woman for what she has to offer whether it be charm-beauty-wit-intelligence or humor but warmth is the quality I value most.” ~ Marlon Brando
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“I only mean forty percent of what I say.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “When I lie on the beach there naked, which I do sometimes, and I feel the wind coming over me and I see the stars up above and I am looking into this very deep, indescribable night, it is something that escapes my vocabulary to describe. Then I think: ‘God, I have no importance. Whatever I do or don’t do, or what anybody does, is not more important than the grains of sand that I am lying on, or the coconut that I am using for my pillow.’ So I really don’t think in the long sense.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “An actor’s a guy who, if you ain’t talking about him, ain’t listening.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “Would people applaud me if I was a good plumber?” ~ Marlon Brando
- “It’s the hardest thing in the world to accept a ‘little’ success and leave it that way.” ~ Marlon Brando
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“Acting is an empty and useless profession.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “Food has always been my friend. When I wanted to feel better or had a crisis in my life, I opened the icebox.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “I think Robert F. Kennedy really, finally, cared; he realized that all of the rhetoric had to be put down into some form of action. That’s perhaps the reason they killed him. They don’t care what you say, you can say as much as you want to, provided you don’t do anything. If you start to do something and your shuffling raises too much dust, they will disestablish you. That’s what happened to Martin Luther King.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “The Jews control Hollywood and use it to promote their own agenda.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “Do you remember when Marilyn Monroe died? Everybody stopped work, and you could see all that day the same expressions on their faces, the same thought: ‘How can a girl with success, fame, youth, money, beauty . . . how could she kill herself?’ Nobody could understand it because those are the things that everybody wants, and they can’t believe that life wasn’t important to Marilyn Monroe, or that her life was elsewhere” ~ Marlon Brando
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“We don’t go anywhere. Going somewhere is for squares. We just go!” ~ Marlon Brando
- “In a close-up, the audience is only inches away, and your face becomes the stage.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “I refused to be a fool dancing on a string held by all of those big shots. I don’t apologise, that’s my life” ~ Marlon Brando
- “I put on an act sometimes, and people think I’m insensitive. Really, it’s like a kind of armor because I’m too sensitive. If there are two hundred people in a room and one of them doesn’t like me, I’ve got to get out.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “I don’t mind that I’m fat. You still get the same money.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “Like a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences and I am not ashamed. But if there is someone who is convinced that Jack Nicholson and I are lovers, may they continue to do so. I find it amusing.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “With women, I’ve got a long bamboo pole with a leather loop on the end. I slip the loop around their necks so they can’t get away or come too close. Like catching snakes.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “We make up any excuse to preserve myths about people we love, but the reverse is also true; if we dislike an individual we adamantly resist changing our opinion, even when somebody offers proof of his decency, because it’s vital to have myths about both the gods and devils in our lives.” ~ Marlon Brando
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“I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That’s my dream. That’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor and surviving.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “If you want something from an audience, you give blood to their fantasies. It’s the ultimate hustle.” ~ Marlon Brando
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“Privacy is not something that I’m merely entitled to, it’s an absolute prerequisite.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “A sensitive person receives fifty impressions where somebody else may only get seven. Sensitive people are so vulnerable; they’re so easily brutalized and hurt just because they are sensitive. The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalized, develop scabs. Analysis helps. It helped me. But still, the last eight, nine years I’ve been pretty messed up, a mess pretty much.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “George Bernard Shaw said that thinking was the greatest of all human endeavors, but I would say that feeling was. Allowing yourself to feel things, to feel love or wrath, hatred, rage.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “The four pillars of wisdom that support journalistic endeavors are lies, stupidity, money-grubbing, and ethical irresponsibility.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “I don’t think I was constructed to be monogamous. I don’t think it’s the nature of any man to be monogamous. Men are propelled by genetically ordained impulses over which they have no control to distribute their seed into as many females as possible.” ~ Marlon Brando
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“Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It’s a bum’s life. Quitting acting, that’s the sign of maturity.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “The power and influence of a movie star is curious: I didn’t ask for it or take it; people gave it to me. Simply because you’re a movie star, people empower you with special rights and privileges.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “What might be a brave choice for you, for another person they may simply not experience fear.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “If the expenditure of money for entertainment in America is any indication of taste, clearly the majority of us are addicted to trash.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “You’ve seen every single race besmirched, but you never saw an unfavorable image of a kike because the Jews are ever watchful for that. They never allowed it to be shown on the screen!” ~ Marlon Brando
- “The military mind has one aim, and that is to make soldiers react as mechanically as possible. They want the same predictability in a man as they do in a telephone or a machine gun, and they train their soldiers to act as a unit, not as individuals.” ~ Marlon Brando Quotes
- “Ask most kids about details about Auschwitz or about how the American Indians were assassinated as a people and they don’t know anything about it. They don’t want to know anything. Most people just want their beer or their soap opera or their lullaby.” ~ Marlon Brando
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“I had to read Wuthering Heights for English and I never enjoyed a book in all my life as much as that one.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “It is a simple fact that all of us use the techniques of acting to achieve whatever ends we seek.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “People around me never say anything. They just seem to want to hear what I have to say. That’s why I do all the talking.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “I don’t know what people expect when they meet me. They seem to be afraid that I’m going to piss in the potted palm and slap them on the ass.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “To grasp the full significance of life is the actor’s duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “I have decided to tell the story of my life as best I can, so that my children can separate the truth from the myths that others have created about me, as myths are created about everyone swept up in the turbulent and distorting maelstrom of celebrity in our culture.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “The only thing an actor owes his public is not to bore them.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “The close-up says everything, it’s then that an actor’s learned, rehearsed behavior becomes most obvious to an audience and chips away, unconsciously, at its experience of reality. In a close-up, the audience is only inches away, and your face becomes the stage.” ~ Marlon Brando
- “The most repulsive thing you could ever imagine is the inside of a camel’s mouth. That and watching a girl eat octopus or squid.” ~ Marlon Brando
