Just as a person, just in my life, the way I was raised, my grandmother made it very clear that God will make a way.Collection: Grandmother
I grew up in the church, Resurrection Baptist Church in Philadelphia, and my grandmother was that grandmother at the church, the one always at the church, always putting on the events. It was deeply instilled in me that every action, everything I create, everything I say and do in the world is inexorably bound to the lives of everybody I come in contact with - and it's my responsibility to put things into the world that have a positive influence on humanity.Collection: Responsibility
I do not have to build a perfect wall today. I just have to lay a perfect brick.Collection: Wall
For our family, the entire structure of our life, our home, our business relationships - the entire purpose is for everyone to be able to create in a way that makes them happy. Fame is almost an inconsequential by-product of what we're really trying to accomplish. We are trying to put great things into the world, we're trying to have fun, and we're trying to become the greatest versions of ourselves in the process of doing things we love.Collection: Fun
I try to connect to human emotion. I'm always looking for something primal, something really base that is beyond language, that people understand beyond language.Collection: People
There’s a redemptive power that making a choice has rather than feeling like you’re an effect to all the things that are happening. Make a choice. Just decide what it’s gonna be, who you’re gonna be, how you are going to do it. Just decide. And from that point, the universe will get out of your way.Collection: Choices
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.Collection: Believe
You can't be scared to die for the truth. The truth is the only thing that is ever going to be constant.Collection: Inspirational
Hurry up and write your number down before I don't want it no more.Collection: Writing
I feel like I could run for President. People often laugh, but if I set my mind to it, within the next 15 years I could be in the White House.Collection: Running
I'm the type of person who is always going to be somewhat dissatisfied with myself. I'm never going to be smart enough. I'm never going to be a good enough father and husband. I'm never going to be a good enough actor for myself. I just never will be, and I have to get comfortable with waking up every day and trying to move some little increment closer to the person I have always dreamed of being. This is the journey.Collection: Husband
Any time you see a white guy in jail, you know he did something bad.Collection: White
Black people playing tennis, next white people will be tap dancing!Collection: White
It feels like God visits everywhere else, but lives in Africa.Collection: Feels
Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and again.Collection: Squirrels
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.Collection: Running
Can I say something? Um, I'm the type of person that if you ask me a question and I don't know the answer, I'm gonna tell you that I don't know. But I bet you what, I know how to find the answer and I will find the answer.Collection: Answers
I refuse to accept anything less than 100% of what I can achieve.Collection: Achieve
Being realistic is the most commonly travelled road to mediocrity. 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.Collection: Thinking
Listen, Michael Jackson is really funny. To have time to spend with him and actually be around him, he's not what....people think he is. Michael Jackson's like a black belt too, so he will kick your ass if you say something about him." In disbelief the interviewer replied "No, really?" to which Will said, "Yes, Michael Jackson kicked over my head!Collection: Thinking
The greatest experience I've ever had in a movie theater was watching "Star Wars." It shaped how I look at the world. My imagination was so small before I went in that theater and there was an explosion in my head. I just couldn't figure out how someone came up with it.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Inspirational
Things work in spite of me sometimes.Collection: Sometimes
I think that when I make a film, I'm terrified that people will come to work and work on something that they're not proud of.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Fun
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.Collection: Acting
Sitting in the movie theater watching "Star Wars," I've never had an experience with any form of entertainment that was like that. It was almost spiritual. I couldn't believe that someone's mind created that. And, right, it felt like George Lucas had a piano that was playing my emotions, and he could go ahead and do whatever he wanted and make me lean forward if he wanted, or he could make me go oh, or he could make me hide my face.Collection: Spiritual
You can't win enough, you can't have enough money, you can't succeed enough. There is not enough.Collection: Winning
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.Collection: People
If you look at somebody like 50 Cent, ain't nobody telling 50 what to do and how to do what he does. He has a vision of who he wants to be, and he instructs everybody along those lines.Collection: Vision
Our whole dream for our home was for it to be an artist's haven. So there are paint supplies; there's a piano with a microphone and a recorder right there to capture things right in the second. There's editing equipment. There are cameras. I think the only thing in our house that people would be surprised by is the efficiency.Collection: Dream
I always thought there was some place I was going, that there was some success or some achievement or some box-office number that was going to fill the hole. And what I realize is that life is a hole. It's a process of continually trying to find and reinvent myself.Collection: Numbers
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.Collection: Growing Up
Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.Collection: Song
Begin each day as if it were on purpose.Collection: Motivational
I consider myself an alchemist. An alchemist is basically a mystical chemist, right? And one of the great feats that alchemists used to do is they would take lead - just take a chunk of lead - and they could turn lead into gold.Collection: Alchemist
Gettin' jiggy wit it is, like, the next level of cool. It's cool to the eighth power. Some people are fly, some people are kind of hot. But when you are the jiggiest, when you exude jiggy-essence, it's the acme of cool.Collection: Essence
What people are perceiving will dictate what their life and ultimately what your interaction is.Collection: People
I have no idea what my limits are. I believe that if I set my mind to it, within the next fifteen years, I would be the President of the United States.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Silly
I love you and I'm here for you.Collection: Friendship
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.Collection: Dream
The value of a story isn't that it just has a narcotic effect. It's that it awakens something in you that makes you want to think, that makes you talk to other people, that stirs something that makes you examine the story that eventually turns into self-examination.Collection: Thinking
For me and my storytelling and the way that I embrace stories in the way that I embrace characters, I desperately needed to know that everything was okay.Collection: Character
I'm starting to be a lot more comfortable with allowing people to decide for themselves and almost creating a situation that forces people to decide for themselves whether they like it or don't like it or agree with the character or disagree with the character.Collection: Character
When you find things that are tried and true for millennia, you can bet that it's going to happen tomorrow.Collection: Tomorrow
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.Collection: Spiritual