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Willard (did not expect that, huh?) Carroll Smith II - a world-famous actor, rapper, comedian, and producer that has taken the pop culture stage by storm ever since he first appeared on our TVs on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air back in the 1990s. His personality, charm, and wits won the audiences instantly and definitely not for nothing! After all, he’s a man of intelligence that shines through in each and every performance or skit he delivers. It also shines through in his famous quotes! And if you’d like to hear a bit more about it, check out our list composed solely of Will Smith quotes.
Some of these winged phrases are actually movie quotes in which he has taken either the center stage or delivered a stellar and unforgettable role as a side character. Sure, you could accredit those words to the writers, but it was his delivery that made them as memorable as they’ve become. Also, his quotes about life, love, and everything in between are as relatable as if he’s just your neighbor sharing the same everyday problems and the very same realities as you. And unlike some other famous people's quotes, he does quite well without any pomp and circumstance - just another point of being relatable and understandable.
So, get ready for our selection of the best quotes by Will Smith - they are just, as usual, a bit further down. Once you are there, don’t forget to vote for the phrases that you liked the most and share this article with your friends.
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#1
“You are who you associate with. Look around at your five closest friends and that’s who you are. If you don’t want to be that person, you know what you gotta do.”
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#4
“If you're not making someone else's life better, then you're wasting your time. Your life will become better by making other lives better.”
#6
“We spend money that we do not have, on things we do not need, to impress people who do not care.”
#8
“The person that works the hardest wins.”
Debbie 2 years ago
Nope, not if you mean work for a job. Or work hard - studying. There use often also a factor off luck involved. Many poor people work very hard. Winning. It implies a competition. So it is not meant to as a spiritual winning/happiness. Does "winning" equate happiness? I'm getting way too philosophical about this.
#10
“I’m motivated by fear. Fear of fear. I hate being scared to do something. And I think what developed in my early days was the attitude that I started attacking things that I was scared of.”
#11
“Sometimes you have to forget what’s gone, appreciate what still remains, and look forward to what’s coming next.”
#13
“Never lie to people, because the people you are able to lie to, are the people who trust you.”
#16
“10 ways to love: listen, speak, give, pray, answer, share, enjoy, trust, forgive, promise.”
#17
“I’d rather live my life knowing that I’m not perfect than spend my whole life pretending to be.”
#20
“Believing in yourself is the first step to accomplishing any goal. If you think you’re going to fail, you probably will.”
#21
“If anybody can find someone to love them and to help them through this difficult thing that we call life, I support that in any shape or form.”
#22
“I have fun. I enjoy my life. And I was hardwired for a deep connection between service, God, and happiness. You kind of need all of those things to be in play for one to have the others.”
#24
“Throughout life people will make you mad, disrespect you and treat you bad. Let God deal with the things they do, cause hate in your heart will consume you too.”
#25
“Fear is not real. It is a product of thoughts you create. Do not misunderstand me. Danger is very real. But fear is a choice.”
#26
“Never lie, steal, cheat, or drink. But if you must lie, lie in the arms of the one you love. If you must steal, steal away from bad company. If you must cheat, cheat death. And if you must drink, drink in the moments that take your breath away”
#27
“Don't chase people. Be yourself, do your own thing and work hard. The right people - the ones who really belong in your life - will come to your. And stay.”
#28
“Never underestimate the pain of a person, because in all honesty, everyone is struggling. Some people are just better at hiding it than others.”
#30
“When your wondering what to say, or how you look... just remember... she is already out with you. That means, she said yes, when she could've said no. That means she made a plan... when she could've just blown you off. So that means it is no longer you job to make her like you... It's is your job not to mess it up.”
#31
“You can't be scared to die for the truth. The truth is the only thing that is ever going to be constant.”
#33
“I want to be the person that is the first person there and the last person to leave. That's who I want to be, because I think the road to success is through commitment, and through the strength to drive through that commitment when it gets hard. And it is going to get hard and you're going to want to quit sometimes, but it'll be colored by who you are, and more who you want to be.”
#34
“Don’t ever let someone tell you that you can’t do something. You got a dream, you gotta protect it. When people can’t do something themselves, they are going to tell you that you can’t do it. You want something, go get it. Period.”
#43
“Remember, don’t try to build the greatest wall that’s ever been built. Focus on laying a single, expertly-placed brick. Then keep doing that, every day.”
#46
“If you’re not willing to work hard, let someone else do it. I’d rather be with someone who does a horrible job, but gives 110% than with someone who does a good job and gives 60%.”
#47
“Be magic choose and believe that you can do anything you set your mind to believe. We are who we choose to be.”
#49
“I think my general disposition on life is finding what’s funny about it. When something happens, the first thing in my mind is, “What’s funny about it?”
#50
“Everybody need a partner to stand right by their side. Not only down for the good times. But also down through the bad times.”
#52
“Make time for it. Just get it done. Nobody ever got strong by thinking about it. They did it.”
#53
“I read a Bruce Lee quote that shifted how I’m trying to live my life right now. He said, “Some targets are only meant to be aimed at.” Right? And I took that to mean a shift for myself from goal orientation to path orientation.”
#54
“Boys laugh at what they put girls through – but they won’t be laughing when – they’re wiping tears off their daughters face for the same reason.”
#55
“There is no pain worse than not achieving a dream when it is your fault. If God did not want you to have it, that is one thing. But if you do not get what you desire because you are lazy, there is no pain worse than that.”
#57
“I look at Bill Clinton, the way I look at Bill Gates. As long as my Microsoft stock is going up, I don’t care what Bill Gates does in the privacy of his own home.”
#61
“As a child, I watched ‘Dallas’ and that was my vision for my life for as long as I could remember.”
#62
“We all want to be in love and find that person who is going to love us no matter how our feet smell, no matter how angry we get one day, no matter the things we say that we don’t mean.”
#63
“I had to focus and create a character in Bagger Vance, not just do my ‘Will Smith’ thing and get paid.”
#64
“Thomas Jefferson was a real poet. He was slick with that ‘pursuit’ of happiness because the ‘pursuit’ puts it back on you.”
#65
“I met my father for the first time when I was 28 years old. I made up my mind that when I had children, my children were going to know who their father was.”
#66
“The desire to be a good father is really innate. There aren’t a lot of movies that depict that relationship because men, we have to pretend that we’re not that emotional about it.”
#68
“I love creating music and television and film. I love the hustle, I love the grind, I love working sixteen- and eighteen-hour days and waking up at four the next morning and going to the gym. I love that.”
#69
“I’ve always been a jokester. The things I got in trouble for, when I was little, was always about making a joke or setting up a prank or being silly when I should be paying attention.”
#70
“A rapper is about being completely true to yourself. Being an actor is about changing who you are.”
#72
“Fear is not real. The only place that fear can exist is in our thoughts of the future. It is a product of our imagination, causing us to fear things that do not at present and may not ever exist. That is near insanity. Do not misunderstand me danger is very real but fear is a choice.”
#73
“The keys to life are running and reading. When you're running, there's a little person that talks to you and says, "Oh I'm tired. My lung's about to pop. I'm so hurt. There's no way I can possibly continue." You want to quit. If you learn how to defeat that person when you're running. You will how to not quit when things get hard in your life. For reading: there have been gazillions of people that have lived before all of us. There's no new problem you could have--with your parents, with school, with a bully. There's no new problem that someone hasn't already had and written about it in a book.”
#74
“Stop letting people who do so little for you control so much of your mind, feelings and emotions.”
#77
“The separation of talent and skill is one of the greatest misunderstood concepts for people who are trying to excel, who have dreams, who want to do things. Talent you have naturally. Skill is only developed by hours and hours and hours of beating on your craft."
#79
“There are so many people who have lived and died before you. You will never have a new problem; you're not going to ever have a new problem. Somebody wrote the answer down in a book somewhere.”
#80
“Basic principles: no matter what, no matter when, no matter who... any man has a chance to sweep any woman off her feet. He just needs the right broom.”
#81
“Too many people are buying things they can't afford, with money that they don't have... to impress people that they don't like!"
#82
“Stop thinking about the damn wall!” he said. “There is no wall. There are only bricks. Your job is to lay this brick perfectly. Then move on to the next brick. Then lay that brick perfectly. Then the next one. Don’t be worrying about no wall. Your only concern is one brick.”
#83
“Does it ever occur to women that maybe a guy might like to have a plan, you know, because he's nervous? He's not sure that he could just walk up to you and you'd respond if he said "I like you." "I like you." "I like you!”
#84
“And where I excel is ridiculous, sickening, work ethic. You know, while the other guy’s sleeping? I’m working.”
#85
“Make a choice of what you want, who you want to be and how you’re going to do it. The universe will get out of your way.”
#89
“When I say I am going to run three miles, I run five. With that mentality, it is actually difficult to lose.”
#91
“What’s the point of being realistic? It’s unrealistic to walk into a room, flip a switch, and have light come on, but fortunately Edison didn’t think so.”
#92
“I keep going because I doubt myself. It drives me to be better. I’ve learned that the mastery of self-doubt is the key to success. It’s like being animated by the love of a woman – the need to be worthy of her.”
#94
“Human beings are not creatures of logic; we are creatures of emotion. And we do not care what’s true. We care how it feels.”
#96
“Anything can go away. There’s no such thing as safety and security. You can do things that give you the illusion of safety and security, but there’s really no such thing.”
#97
“I can’t run away when I’m scared. I always have to attack. That’s how I deal with seemingly difficult things.”
#99
“I want to represent the idea that you really can make what you want I believe I can create whatever I want to create.”
#100
“You play a part in every aspect of your life going the way you want or not going the way that you want. It has very little to do with other people.”
#101
“Give me a problem, I’ll give you a solution. I just love living. That’s a feeling you can’t fake. I’m glad every single day. I think that even the camera can feel that I’m a happy man.”
#103
“I believe you need to be educated about what you want to do in life, but I don’t believe you actually need college to get you there.”
#104
“We didn’t grow up with the sense that where we were was where we were gonna be. We grew up with the sense that where we were almost didn’t matter, because we will be becoming something greater.”
#105
“I’ve always been attracted to characters with insurmountable odds and obstacles, because innately, however inarticulately I’ve always believed that my dreams and my desires can command and bend time and space to be the things that I want them to be.”
#106
“I’ve trained myself to illuminate the things in my personality that are likable and to hide and protect the things that are less likeable.”
#108
“I control every interaction with every human being I’m with. I can actually manage any situation with 98 percent of the people on Earth.”
#109
“When you find things that are tried and true for millennia, you can bet that it’s going to happen tomorrow.”
#111
“It’s quite highly possible that I have peaked. I mean, I just can’t imagine what else I could do beyond this. It’s really a bittersweet kind of feeling.”
#113
“I’m a student of world religion, so to me, it’s hugely important to have knowledge and to understand what people are doing.”
#114
“I don’t know what my calling is, but I want to be here for a bigger reason. I strive to be like the greatest people who have ever lived.”
#115
“My God, my higher power, it’s mine and mine alone. I create my connection, and I decide what my connection is going to be.”
#116
“The guy who’s willing to hustle the most is gonna be the guy that just gets that loose ball.”
#117
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t driving around on a bus and having a campfire kind of adding to the environment problem?”
#118
“I refuse to accept anything less than 100% of what I can achieve.”
#121
“Whatever you have is gonna die and you are gonna have to rebirth something new. You have to be willing to ride the waves.”
#122
“I like to look good, but I like my body to function well more than anything. For me, it’s as spiritual and intellectual as it is physical. And emotional. I enjoy pushing myself.”
#123
“What people are perceiving will dictate what their life and ultimately what your interaction is.”
#124
“You can’t break poor people mentality. Once you grow up poor, you don’t take anything for granted. It can have the negative side also because you can never truly be relaxed.”
#125
“I believe that eclecticism is a virtue. It may not be a word, but its definitely a virtue.”
#126
“Being famous is such a gift for me because small things make people’s lives brighter. You just shake somebody’s hand. You just smile and write your name and people will talk about it for the rest of their lives.”
#127
“When I was young, and I’d get A’s, I’d get this good feeling of all the things that I could be. And then I’d never became any of them.”
#128
“The execs don’t care what color you are. They care about how much money you make. Hollywood is not really black or white. It’s green.”
#129
“For me, there is nothing more valuable than how people feel in a movie theater about a movie.”
#130
“I think it would be arrogant and borderline foolish to believe there’s no other life forms that exist out there.”
#131
“I’m a student of patterns. At heart, I’m a physicist. I look at everything in my life as trying to find the single equation, the theory of everything.”
#132
“I believe that my connection to my higher power, is separate from everybody else’s. I don’t believe that the Muslims have all the answers and I don’t believe the Christians or the Jews have all the answers.”
#133
“There’s so much negative imagery of black fatherhood. I’ve got tons of friends that are doing the right thing by their kids, and doing the right thing as a father – and how come that’s not as newsworthy?”
#135
“One of my teachers used to call me Prince, because I always had a way of charming myself in and out of different situations.”
#136
“Part of being an actor is almost self-hypnosis during those brief moments when the cameras are rolling. You want to actually believe you’re Chris Gardner or Muhammad Ali.”
#137
“I think with movies I am really connecting to the Joseph Campbell idea of the collective unconscious.”
#138
“It’s great to be black in Hollywood. When a black actor does something, it seems new and different just by virtue of the fact that he’s black.”
#139
“I was raised in a Baptist household, went to a Catholic church, lived in a Jewish neighborhood, and had the biggest crush on the Muslim girls from one neighborhood over.”
#140
“Tommy Lee Jones is hilarious. I would say, if you look at the body of his work, the character he is most like is the one in ‘The Fugitive.’ That’s how he talks and jokes. That is the type of energy he has.”
#142
“When I was growing up, I installed refrigerators in supermarkets. My father was an electrical engineer.”
#144
“So to really be able to dive into what does it mean to be broken by an experience, and I developed it just through research and talking and understanding the truth of what it means to lose everything.”
#145
“Why is life at this point in the twentieth century so focused upon the very beginning of life and the very end of life? What about the 80 years we have to live between those two inexorable bookends?”
#146
“Coming from sitcom television and coming from music you burn up every single second. You don’t leave anything there. You burn it up and you pass out when you walk off stage, so I took that concept into acting.”
#147
“In black neighborhoods, everybody appreciated comedy about real life. In the white community, fantasy was funnier. I started looking for the jokes that were equally hilarious across the board, for totally different reasons.”
#148
“Goofy was the word that was used most often by my sisters because I’ve been this tall ever since I was 12 years old.”
#149
“I love producing. I am loving doing that. I think that is my most natural space in the business. I just love producing or editing and that’s where I thrive.”
#150
“The first time that I performed as an actor was the first day on the set of ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.’”
#151
“I first wanted to be a comedian when I was six or seven and my dad showed me Laurel and Hardy’s “Perfect Day” on TV.”
#152
“I try to speak my points of view about black America, and how I feel about black men and the role that black men should play in their lives with their children and in their lives with their women.”
#153
“My skin is hard when it comes to my music. But with my movies, I’m still a virgin in a lot of ways. I’m not used to being shot down for no reason.”
#154
“Give me about 10 years, I’m going to run for President. If I can squeeze in an NBA championship before that, I’ll do it.”
#155
“I’ve always been the goofy kid. Growing up, I always enjoyed the comedic aspect of relating to women. Even on camera, it was always the funny take on it.”
#156
“We spend money that we do not have, on things we do not need, to impress people who do not care.”
#157
“Because thats what people do... they leap and hope to God they can fly! Because otherwise, we just drop like a rock... wondering the whole way down..."why in the hell did I jump?" But here I am Sarah, falling. And there's only one person that makes me feel like I can fly... that's you.”
#158
“Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress people they don't like.”
#160
“You don’t set out to build a wall. You don't say ‘I’m going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that’s ever been built.’ You don’t start there. You say, ‘I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid.’ You do that every single day. And soon you have a wall.”
#161
“I want the world to be better, because I was here. I want my life, I want my work, my family, I want it to mean something and if you are not making someone else’s life better then you are wasting your time.”
#162
“I know who I am, I know what I believe, that’s all I need to know. From there, you do what you need to do.”
#164
“I’ve always considered myself to be just average talent and what I have is a ridiculous insane obsessiveness for practice and preparation.”
#166
“A sad thing in life is that sometimes you meet someone who means a lot to you, only to find out in the end it was never bound to be, and you just have to let go.”
#167
“There is nothing like having to change your physical form to put you in contact with every weak part of yourself, to train yourself in discipline. Put somebody on a treadmill and I’ll tell you how good they are at any other thing they do in life.”
#168
“Traditional education is based on facts and figures and passing tests – not on a comprehension of the material and its application to your life.”
#169
“If you learn how to defeat that person when you’re running. You will know how to not quit when things get hard in your life.”
#171
“You have to believe that something different than what has happened for the last 50 million years of history – you have to believe that something different can happen.”
#172
“You can create whatever you want. You just have to know what you want and take the opportunities as they come your way. We are who we choose to be.”
#173
“Just stay ready. Stay in shape and then you don’t have to rush to train before the movie starts. I’ll show you my abs later because I’m in shape. But that idea, if you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready.”
#174
“I’ve never really viewed myself as particularly talented. I’ve viewed myself as slightly above average in talent.”
#175
“I want to take care of people. I want to help people. The maximum joy that I have is when I can create something that makes someone else’s life lighter, brighter, or better.”
#177
“She has got to have command of her body. So when she goes out into the world, she’s going out with a command that is hers. She is used to making those, decisions herself.”
#178
“On learning to swim: I’m too big to have some woman hold my stomach and say ‘Now kick your feet.’”
#179
“The big thing I tell my kids is you have to control how you label things. It’s very important to me they understand the power they have to create the lives that they want.”
#180
“The women who don’t seek attention are usually the women you need to be giving your attention to.”
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