Perhaps more than anyone these days, Will Smith has been in the news quite a bit.
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And while his incident at the 2022 Oscar ceremony has certainly been talked about a lot and is certainly still at the forefront of many people’s minds, it is not the subject here.
Here, we want to highlight what the award-winning artist has said throughout the rest of his career. Smith, who has been in our lives for decades as The Fresh Prince and later as a Grammy Award-winning rapper, is a skilled and talented performer.
But what has the 53-year-old, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-born Smith said about life, love, his craft, spirituality, and much more?
Without further ado, let’s dive into the 21 best Will Smith quotes that may or may not have aged well.
1. “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.”
2. “Money and success don’t change people; they merely amplify what is already there.”
3. “The first step is you have to say that you can.”
4. “The things that have been most valuable to me I did not learn in school.”
5. “I’ve always considered myself to be just average talent and what I have is a ridiculous insane obsessiveness for practice and preparation.”
6. “I know how to learn anything I want to learn. I absolutely know that I could learn how to fly the space shuttle because someone else knows how to fly it, and they put it in a book. Give me the book, and I do not need somebody to stand up in front of the class.”
7. “You can cry, ain’t no shame in it.”
8. “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.”
9. “I have a great time with my life, and I wanna share it.”
10. “When you create art, the world has to wait.”
11. “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.”
12. “I had a hit single on the radio for 30 days before I graduated from high school.”
13. “I want the world to be better because I was here.”
14. “In my mind, I’ve always been an A-list Hollywood superstar. Y’all just didn’t know yet.”
15. “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%.”
16. “Whatever your dream is, every extra penny you have needs to be going to that.”
17. “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.”
18. “My school was 90 percent white, but 90 percent of the kids I played with were black. So I got the best of both worlds. I think that is where my comedy developed.”
19. “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.”
20. “When I was growing up, I installed refrigerators in supermarkets. My father was an electrical engineer.’
21. “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.”
