Phrases

-The best gift you can give yourself is the gift of possibility.

-A man can only be judged by his actions, and not by his good intentions or his beliefs.

-If you have no enemies, you have no character. Taking a stand always creates opposition.

-Dreams without movement are delusions, escapes, kid’s play. You have to put your feet into your dreams if they’re ever going to be reality. The dreamers we know and love today are the ones who worked the hardest

-When you see the right thing to do, you’d better do it.

-The best thing you can give yourselves…is the gift of possibility. And the best thing you can give each other is the pledge to go on protecting that gift in each other as long as you live.

-The embarrassing thing is that my salad dressing is out-grossing my films.

-The problem with getting older is you still remember how things used to be.

-I’m like a good cheese. I’m just getting mouldy enough to be interesting.

-We are such spendthrifts with our lives, the trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.

-What could be better than to hold your hand out to people less fortunate than you are?

-Choose between yesterday and tomorrow.

-People stay married because they want to, not because the doors are locked.

-A dollar won is twice as sweet as a dollar earned.

-The need is great and so are the opportunities to make a difference.

-Sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.

-You only grow when you are alone.

-I check my pulse and if I can find it, I know I’ve got a chance

-The only question I ever ask any woman is, ‘what time is your husband coming home?’

-I think it’s very desirable to be an individual and a free thinker.

-A lot of people have dreams and never do anything about them. When you have ideas and dreams, you do something about it.

-The big difference between people is not between the rich and the poor, the good and the evil. The biggest of all differences between people is between those who have had pleasure in love and those who haven’t.

-It’s really important to be attentive to the people who have less – who are less fortunate than you are.

-What we got here is a failure to communicate.

-I don’t like to discuss my marriage, but I will tell you something which may sound corny but which happens to be true. I have steak at home. Why should I go out for hamburger?

-Being on President Nixon’s enemies list was the highest single honor I’ve ever received. Who knows who’s listening to me now and what government list I’m on?

-A man without enemies is a man without character.

-It happens to everybody, horses, dogs, men. Nobody gets out of life alive.

-Make sure you live life, which means don’t do things where you court celebrity, and give something positive back to our society.

-The Alexander Technique helped a long-standing back problem and to get a good night’s sleep after many years of tossing and turning.

-There really is no such thing as a sick child; there are children who happen to be sick. Think about it, and you will understand the magic of the Camps

-Winning isn’t everything…. it’s just all there is.

-If you’re playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.

-I want to acknowledge luck, the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others.

-You say somebody’s guilty, everybody believes you. You say they’re innocent, nobody cares.

-There are two Newman’s laws. The first one is “It is useless to put on your brakes when you’re upside down.” The second is “Just when things look darkest, they go black.

-I wanted, I think, to acknowledge Luck: the chance of it, the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others; made especially savage for children because they may not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it.

-A man with no enemies is a man with no character.

-On adultery: “Why fool around with hamburger when you have steak at home?

-To be an actor you have to be a child.

-At the beginning of your career, it’s ‘Who is Paul Newman?’ and then it’s ‘Get me Paul Newman.’ Then it’s ‘Get me a young Paul Newman.’ Then it’s ‘Who is Paul Newman?’

-For some players, luck itself is an art

-From the very beginning, we bucked tradition. When the experts said that something was “always done” in a certain way, we’d do it our way, which was sometimes the very opposite.

-I don’t think there’s anything exceptional or noble in being philanthropic. It’s the other attitude that confuses me.

-We all die, just a question of when.

-I just hope when my body goes, or when my mind does, I have the guts to end it the way Hemingway did. I don’t want anybody wiping drool off my chin.

-I changed my life today. What did you do?

-Fill the moment and find variety.

-Building weapons that we don’t need, don’t work, and aren’t necessary, and have no mission — that’s not bad politics, that’s robbery.

-Watching something is nothing like doing it.

-Newman’s first law: It is useless to put on your brakes when you’re upside down.

-I have vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals.

-The spaghetti sauce is a good thing to think about. Morning, noon, and night, think about the spaghetti sauce. Think about hustling other people to buy the spaghetti sauce.

-I respect generosity in people, and I respect it in companies too, I don’t look at it as philanthropy; I see it as an investment in the community.

-I never ask my wife about my flaws. Instead I try to get her to ignore them and concentrate on my sense of humor.

-Those with a moral deficit put on a good show, and sleep like a baby.

-It’s been a privilege to be here.

-There are three rules for running a business; fortunately, we don’t know any of them.

-Men experience many passions in a lifetime. One passion drives away the one before it.

-People like to do what they used to do after they’ve stopped being able to do it.

-I would like it if people would think that beyond Newman, there’s a spirit that takes action, a heart, and a talent that doesn’t come from my blue eyes.

-If I ever feel like I’m doing something I’ve done before, I scrap it and start over again.

-To that extent that you can sustain and maintain that childlike part of your personality is probably the best part of acting.

-It’s like chasing a beautiful woman for 80 years. Finally, she relents and you say, ‘I’m terribly sorry. I’m tired.’

-An actor has to evaluate his own abilities and be honest with himself.

-I have taken roads that I wished I had not traveled on. And I’m traveling on some pretty exciting ones, too.

-Natural law. Sons are put on this earth to trouble their fathers.

-A feud should live a full and colorful life, and then it should die a natural death and be forgotten.

-Where the hell are the singing cats?

-You got to have two things to win. You got to have brains and you got to have balls. Now you’ve got too much of one and not enough of the other.

-Who’s to say who’s an expert?

-For those of you who like to scarf your popcorn in the sack, the good news is that Newman’s Own contains an aphrodisiac.

-I don’t go for the so-called “intimate” stuff. Column items that report: “Minerva Ferncroft sleeps in pink dusting powder between puce-colored sheets in a heart-shaped bed.” It leaves me cold.

-It seems to me that the older I get, the more running around I do with less satisfaction, just spinning my wheels.

-Our marriage works because we each carry clubs of equal weight and size.

-The characters I have the least in common with are the ones I have the greatest success with. The further a role is from my own experience, the more I try to deepen it.

-The accusation is always on the first page, and the retraction on page 19.

-You can’t be as old as I am without waking up with a surprised look on your face every morning: ‘Holy Christ, whaddya know – I’m still around!’ It’s absolutely amazing that I survived all the booze and smoking and the cars and the career.

-The only way we can give our children the best education in the world and prepare them for the next century is by funding the programs that serve them.

-There are a lot of drivers who can carry a car. It doesn’t happen very often very successfully. I think it takes a certain amount of sensible bravery. It’s no good to be brave and just keep crashing.

-I am convinced that a person is entitled to as much privacy as he wants. It should be his privilege to keep certain areas of his life out of the newspapers.

-Acting is like letting your pants down; you’re exposed.

-Newman’s second law: Just when things look darkest, they go black.

-While progress should never come to a halt, there are many places it should never come to at all.

-It’s always darkest before it turns absolutely pitch black.