Michael Andrew Fox OC known professionally as Michael J. Fox, is a Canadian-American retired actor, author, film producer, and activist with a film and television career spanning from the 1970s to 2020. He starred in the Back to the Future trilogy in which he portrayed Marty McFly. On television, he played Alex P. Keaton on the NBC sitcom Family Ties (1982–1989) and Mike Flaherty on the ABC sitcom Spin City (1996–2000). He has won five Primetime Emmy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, a Grammy Award, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards. These Michael J Fox quotes will motivate you.
Best Michael J Fox Quotes
- “The more I expect, the more unhappy I am going to be. The more I accept, the more serene I am.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “Our challenges don’t define us, our actions do.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there’s got to be a way through it.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “I remember my son wanted to go to bed with his cowboy boots on, and we had this fight for like an hour. Then I realized that the only good reason I had for him not to do it is because I didn’t want him to. There was really no other reason. And finally I said, “OK, fine.” It was a great victory for me, because I realized it doesn’t really matter.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “One’s dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but cannot be taken away unless it is surrendered.” ~ Michael J. Fox
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“Family is not an important thing. It’s everything.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence I can reach for; perfection is God’s business.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “When something enters your life that is so big and so non-negotiable as catastrophic illness, you either go in denial for a while or ultimately you accept it and you make space for it. And in making space for it, you illuminate a lot of things that you normally don’t have room for you simply just look at the world differently.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “If you have one foot in yesterday and one foot in tomorrow, you’re pissing all over today.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “If you fixate on the worst-case scenario and it actually happens, you’ve lived it twice.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “A creative mess is better than idle tidiness.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “I like to encourage people to realize that any action is a good action if it’s proactive and there is positive intent behind it.” ~ Michael J. Fox
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“Happiness is a decision.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “Don’t spend a lot of time imagining the worst-case scenario. It rarely goes down as you imagine it will, and if by some fluke it does, you will have lived it twice.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “Look at the choices you have, not the choices that have been taken away from you. In them, there are whole worlds of strength and new ways to look at things.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there’s no water, they’ll drink the sand.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “If you want to be an agent of change, it starts with you and what you’re made of.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “I see possibilities in everything. For everything that’s taken away, something of greater value has been given.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “There are no moments you have frozen in amber. It’s moving, it’s changing, so appreciate what’s good about right now and be ready for what’s next.” ~ Michael J. Fox
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“When life takes away, something of greater value is always given in return.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “Do the right thing, and then do the next right thing, and that will lead you to the next right thing after that.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “I have no choice about whether or not I have Parkinson’s. I have nothing but choices about how I react to it. In those choices, there’s freedom to do a lot of things in areas that I wouldn’t have otherwise found myself in.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it saved my ass.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “But the key to our marriage is the capacity to give each other a break. And to realize that it’s not how our similarities work together; it’s how our differences work together.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “The purpose that you wish to find in life, like a cure you seek, is not going to fall from the sky. …I believe purpose is something for which one is responsible; it’s not just divinely assigned.” ~ Michael J Fox Quotes
- “The first part of my life was to be an actor and maybe have some success at that. Then [it was time] to find somebody to be in a relationship with and have a life that way. Because of Parkinson’s, I had to change: How can I be of service here? Is there something unique to my situation that I can use to help people? I did not have the wherewithal to invent that. It just happened in front of me and had me join in.” ~ Michael J. Fox
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“The least amount of judging we can do, the better off we are.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “A lot of times, when you have a disability, one of the things you deal with is other people’s projections of what your experience is and their fear about it, and not seeing the experience you’re having. There’s nothing horrifying about it to me. It is what I deal with. It is my reality and my life, but it’s not horrible.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “I often say now I don’t have any choice whether or not I have Parkinson’s, but surrounding that non-choice is a million other choices that I can make.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “Everything is cause and effect. If you don’t move, nothing will move with you, and nothing will move toward you.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “One of the great things about Parkinson’s, in a superficial way, is it relieved me of vanity. I don’t worry about what I look like, because it’s literally out of my hands. But on a deeper level, it gives you a real humility, because you have to deal every day with the fact that you compromise.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “I don’t burden myself too much with others’ expectations – or even my own expectations. I think your happiness grows in direct proportion to your acceptance, and in inverse proportion to your expectations. It’s just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other – or doing the next right thing, so to speak.” ~ Michael J. Fox
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“I think the scariest person in the world is the person with no sense of humor.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “There’s an idea I came across a few years ago that I love: My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance and in inverse proportion to my expectations. That’s the key for me. If I can accept the truth of ‘This is what I’m facing – not what can I expect but what I am experiencing now’ – then I have all this freedom to do other things.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “My experience is to deal with things through humor.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “I urge you to be challenged and inspired by what you do not know.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “Whatever the situation, just take it for what it is. You don’t have to make it worse or better than it is. It just is what it is. Always deal with the honesty, the truth of what something is, and then you’ve got all kinds of choices.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “There’s always failure. And there’s always disappointment. And there’s always loss. But the secret is learning from the loss, and realizing that none of those holes are vacuums.” ~ Michael J. Fox
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“If you allow for the possibilities of something better, you move toward it instinctively.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “I don’t have a set of tenets, but I live an ethical life. I practice a humility that presupposes there’s a power greater than myself. And I always believe, don’t inflict harm where it’s not necessary.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “I can get sad, I can get frustrated, I can get scared, but I never get depressed – because there’s joy in my life.” ~ Michael J Fox Quotes
- “It’s all about control. Control is illusory. No matter what university you go to, no matter what degree you hold, if your goal is to become master of your own destiny, you have more to learn. Parkinson’s is a perfect metaphor for lack of control. Every unwanted movement in my hand or arm, every twitch that I cannot anticipate or arrest, is a reminder that even in the domain of my own being, I am not calling the shots. I tried to exert control by drinking myself to a place of indifference, which just exacerbated the sense of miserable hopelessness.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “The way life runs through everything, even the tiniest elements of nature – that makes me humble. It’s the same humility that causes people at a certain time every day to get on their knees and put their foreheads on the ground in honor of something or someone.” ~ Michael J. Fox
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“Optimism is a cure for many things.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “The only thing worse than an opportunity you don’t deserve is blowing an opportunity.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “I happen to be a Parkinson’s patient. I’m not fearful of my condition or my future – but if someone is looking in my eyes for fear, then they see their own fear reflected back at them.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “Life is what you put into it and how much you take out of it. You put in more than is expected, and you take out less than you want.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “There’s a rule in acting called, ‘Don’t play the result.’ If you have a character who’s going to end up in a certain place, don’t play that until you get there. Play each scene and each beat as it comes. And that’s what you do in life: You don’t play the result.” ~ Michael J. Fox
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“Pity is a benign form of abuse.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “Turning fully toward the glass, I consider what I see. This reflected version of myself, wet, shaking, rumpled, pinched, and slightly stoop, would be alarming were it not for the self-satisfied expression pasted across my face. I would ask the obvious question, ‘what are you smiling about?’ But I already know the answer: ‘It just gets better from here.'” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “Discipline is just doing the same thing the right way whether anyone’s watching or not.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “I discovered that I was part of a Parkinson’s community with similar experiences and similar questions that I’d been dealing with alone.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “I’m going to marry a Jewish woman because I like the idea of getting up Sunday morning and going to the deli.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “With Parkinson’s, it’s like you’re in the middle of the street and you’re stuck there in cement shoes and you know a bus is coming at you, but you don’t know when. You think you can hear it rumbling, but you have a lot of time to think. And so you just don’t live that moment of the bus hitting you until it happens. There’s all kinds of room in that space.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “If you asked my kids to describe me, they’d go through a whole list of words before even thinking about Parkinson’s. And honestly, I don’t think about it that much either. I talk about it because it’s there, but it’s not my totality.” ~ Michael J. Fox
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“Acceptance is the key to everything.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “Zoos are becoming facsimiles – or perhaps caricatures – of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “Always be available to your kids. Because if you say, ‘Give me five minutes, give me ten minutes,’ it’ll be 15, it’ll be 20. And then when you get there, the shine will have worn off whatever it is they wanted to share with you.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “I had all the usual ambition growing up. I wanted to be a writer, a musician, a hockey player. I wanted to do something that wasn’t nine to five. Acting was the first thing I tried that clicked.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “To be associated with a film that just flat-out makes people happy is such a blessing and a tremendous privilege, and I’ll always be grateful for it. People’s eyes light up when they talk about it. I’ve been in Asia, Africa, Europe and even Bhutan; people know the movie there. It’s just an amazing thing.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “I was eccentric, even as a kid. I was an early reader, an early talker. I was very curious in a way that maybe the other kids weren’t. I was a little more outgoing.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “I think I benefited from being equal parts ambitious and curious. And of the two, curiosity has served me best.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “When prescribing one of the drugs I take, my doctor warned me of a common side effect: exaggerated, intensely vivid dreams. To be honest, I’ve never really noticed the difference. I’ve always dreamt big.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “Chris[topher] Reeve wisely parsed the difference between optimism and hope. Unlike optimism, he said, ‘Hope is the product of knowledge and the projection of where the knowledge can take us.” ~ Michael J. Fox
