Thomas Jeffrey Hanks is an American actor and filmmaker. Known for both his comedic and dramatic roles, Hanks is one of the most popular and recognizable film stars worldwide, and is widely regarded as an American cultural icon. Hanks made his breakthrough with leading roles in the comedies Splash (1984) and Big (1988). He won two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor for starring as a gay lawyer suffering from AIDS in Philadelphia (1993) and a young man with below-average IQ in Forrest Gump (1994).
Hanks collaborated with film director Steven Spielberg on five films, which launched him as a director, producer, and screenwriter. Hanks’ accolades include two Academy Awards. He has received the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for Excellence in Film from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2004. In 2014, he received a Kennedy Center Honor, and in 2016, he received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, as well as the French Legion of Honor.
Some of the best quotes from Tom Hanks are listed below.
- “A hero is someone who voluntarily walks into the unknown.” – Tom Hanks
- “And I’m not apolitical – I’m very specific in my politics. But a lot of the time it’s nobody’s business unless you’re over at my house having dinner.” – Tom Hanks
- “At the end of the day it’s got to be a good movie, it’s got to be a funny movie, and it’s got to make people think, ’Hey, I couldn’t have spent my time any better.’” – Tom Hanks
- “Being kind always works.” – Tom Hanks
- “Believing is seeing and seeing is believing.” – Tom Hanks
- “Even the simplest choice can make a jaw-dropping difference in our world.” – Tom Hanks
- “Everybody has something that chews them up and, for me, that thing was always loneliness. The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are.” – Tom Hanks
- “From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It’s not a miracle; we just decided to go.” – Tom Hanks
- “Help publicly. Help privately. Help make sense where sense has gone missing. Help science to solve and faith to soothe. Help, and you will abolish apathy — the void that is so quickly filled by ignorance and evil.” – Tom Hanks
- “Human beings do things for a reason, even if sometimes it’s the wrong reason.” – Tom Hanks
- “I am who I am, and I think I have a good nature, by and large. But if someone takes advantage of that good nature, well then, you know, I’m not that nice a guy.” – Tom Hanks
- “I love what I do for a living, it’s the greatest job in the world, but you have to survive an awful lot of attention that you don’t truly deserve and you have to live up to your professional responsibilities and I’m always trying to balance that with what is really important.” – Tom Hanks
- “I think it’s better to feel good than to look good.” – Tom Hanks
- “I want to have a good time myself. I don’t want to dread going to work no matter what the gig is. I think, selfishly, I will make sure that I have a good time; how about that?” – Tom Hanks
- “I went to college because I didn’t have anywhere else to go and it was a fabulous hang. And while I was there, I was exposed to this world that I didn’t know was possible.” – Tom Hanks
- “I will entertain anything; it doesn’t matter. You know, it’s not obviously about the price, it’s not about who, it’s kind of about when and what. It’s material, that’s all.” – Tom Hanks
- “I’ve made over 20 movies, and 5 of them are good.” – Tom Hanks
- “If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great.” – Tom Hanks
- “If you can feel like a good man in your 40s, you can feel like a better man in your 50s, a Superman in your 60s, and maybe a Spider-Man in your 70s.” – Tom Hanks
- “If you have to have a job in this world, a high-priced movie star is a pretty good gig.” – Tom Hanks
- “If you’re funny, if there’s something that makes you laugh, then every day’s going to be okay.” – Tom Hanks
- “It is meant to make people think, ‘How in the world did we do that, and isn’t it a marvelous thing that we did?’ – Tom Hanks
- “It’s always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It’s hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.” – Tom Hanks
- “It’s just as hard… staying happily married as it is doing movies.” – Tom Hanks Quotes
- “May you live as long as you want and not want as long as you live.” – Tom Hanks
- “Movie-making is telling a story with the best technology at your disposal.” – Tom Hanks
- “My job has always been to hold a mirror up to nature.” – Tom Hanks
- “My wife keeps on telling me my worst fault is that I keep things to myself and appear relaxed. But I am really in a room in my own head and not hearing a thing anyone is saying.” – Tom Hanks
- “Never give up because you never know what the tide will bring in the next day.” – Tom Hanks
- “Show up on time. Know your lines. Have an idea of what to do in the scene. the rest will take care of itself.” – Tom Hanks
- “Some people are cowards… I think by and large a third of people are villains, a third are cowards, and a third are heroes. Now, a villain and a coward can choose to be a hero, but they’ve got to make that choice.” – Tom Hanks
- “Some people go to bed at night thinking, ‘That was a good day.’ I am one of those who worries and asks, ‘How did I screw up today?’” – Tom Hanks
- “The nature of the movies is different than it was five years ago, and they’re all driven by the possibilities of CGI, which means you can make anything happen on screen that you can possibly desire.” – Tom Hanks
- “The only way you can truly control how you are seen is by being honest all the time.” – Tom Hanks
- “There isn’t any great mystery about me. What I do is glamorous and has an awful lot of white-hot attention placed on it. But the actual work requires the same discipline and passion as any job you love doing, be it as a very good pipe fitter or a highly creative artist.” – Tom Hanks
- “There’s a difference between solitude and loneliness. I can understand the concept of being a monk for a while.” – Tom Hanks
- “There’s millions of survivors out there make it one million and one.” – Tom Hanks
- “There’s no greater joy than that seen through the eyes of a child, and there’s a little bit of a child in all of us.” – Tom Hanks
- “Truth is, I’ll never know all there is to know about you just as you will never know all there is to know about me. Humans are by nature too complicated to be understood fully. So, we can choose either to approach our fellow human beings with suspicion or to approach them with an open mind, a dash of optimism and a great deal of candour.” – Tom Hanks
- “We are still in the position of waking up and having a choice. Do I make the world better today somehow, or do I not bother?” – Tom Hanks
- “Well, as with anything, if you want to believe you can find reasons to.” – Tom Hanks
- “You can always try to do something. Keep moving forward. Keep trying stuff.” – Tom Hanks
- “You cannot look up at the night sky on the Planet Earth and not wonder what it’s like to be up there amongst the stars. And I always look up at the moon and see it as the single most romantic place within the cosmos.” – Tom Hanks
- “You learn more from getting your butt kicked than getting it kissed.” – Tom Hanks
