105 Most Famous Paul Newman Quotes on Success

Paul Leonard Newman was an iconic American actor, director, race car driver, philanthropist and entrepreneur.

Born in 1925, Newman developed a passion for theater from an early age.
He studied drama and economics at Kenyon College, honed his acting skills at the Yale School of Drama and Actors Studio.

Newman garnered acclaim for his roles in major films including ‘The Hustler,’ ‘Cool Hand Luke,’ ‘The Sting,’ and ‘The Color of Money,’ the latter earning him an Academy Award.

Besides his acting career, he excelled in Sports Car Club of America road racing, earning several national championships.

Newman was also a philanthropist, co-founding Newman’s Own food company, which donated all profits to charity.

Related: Brad Dourif Quotes from the Famous American Actor and Sam Richardson Quotes from the American Actor

He also started the SeriousFun Children’s Network for children with serious illnesses and the Safe Water Network, improving access to safe water globally.

He fathered six children and was married to actress Joanne Woodward.

I have listed down some of the best quotes from Paul Newman.

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Most Famous Paul Newman Quotes

1. “It’s always darkest before it turns absolutely pitch black.” ~ (Paul Newman).

2. “A dollar won is twice as sweet as a dollar earned.” ~ (Paul Newman).

3. “I check my pulse and if I can find it, I know I’ve got a chance.” ~ (Paul Newman).

4. “We all die. It’s just a question of when.” ~ (Paul Newman).

5. “The best gift you can give yourself is the gift of possibility.” ~ (Paul Newman).

6. “You only grow when you are alone.” ~ (Paul Newman).

7. “A man can only be judged by his actions, and not by his good intentions or his beliefs.” ~ (Paul Newman).

8. “A man with no enemies is a man with no character.” ~ (Paul Newman).

9. “Admit it. I’m the best you ever seen, Fats. I’m the best there is. And even if you beat me, I’m still the best.” ~ (Paul Newman).

10. “Choose between yesterday and tomorrow.” ~ (Paul Newman).

11. “I’d like to be remembered as a guy who tried – who tried to be part of his times, tried to help people communicate with one another, tried to find some decency in his own life, tried to extend himself as a human being. Someone who isn’t complacent, who doesn’t cop out.” ~ (Paul Newman).

12. “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.” ~ (Paul Newman).

13. “For some players, luck itself is an art.” ~ (Paul Newman).

14. “If you don’t have enemies, you don’t have character.” ~ (Paul Newman).

15. “I want to acknowledge luck, the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others.” ~ (Paul Newman).

16. “Natural law. Sons are put on this earth to trouble their fathers.” ~ (Paul Newman).

17. “If you’re playing a poker game and you look around the table and can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.” ~ (Paul Newman).

18. “In racing, the fastest person wins. It is very simple.” ~ (Paul Newman).

19. “I will continue to get behind the wheel of a racing car as long as I am able. But that could all end tomorrow.” ~ (Paul Newman).

20. “I changed my life today. What did you do?” ~ (Paul Newman).

Best Paul Newman Quotes

21. “When you see the right thing to do, you’d better do it.” ~ (Paul Newman).

22. “A lot of people have dreams and never do anything about them. When you have ideas and dreams, you do something about it.” ~ (Paul Newman).

23. “It happens to everybody, horses, dogs, men. Nobody gets out of life alive.” ~ (Paul Newman).

24. “I have a vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals.” ~ (Paul Newman).

25. “The accusation is always on the first page, and the retraction on page 19.” ~ (Paul Newman).

26. “Acting isn’t really a creative profession. It’s an interpretative one.” ~ (Paul Newman).

27. “I’m like a good cheese. I’m just getting moldy enough to be interesting.” ~ (Paul Newman).

28. “Watching something is nothing like doing it.” ~ (Paul Newman).

29. “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?” ~ (Paul Newman).

30. “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.” ~ (Paul Newman).

31. “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.” ~ (Paul Newman).

Great Paul Newman Quotes

32. “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.” ~ (Paul Newman).

33. “Men experience many passions in a lifetime. One passion drives away the one before it.” ~ (Paul Newman).

34. “I have taken roads that I wished I had not traveled on. And I’m traveling on some pretty exciting ones, too. Just hope when you get to that great racetrack in the sky, that the balance will tip slightly into those things that you’d be proud of.” ~ (Paul Newman).

35. “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.” ~ (Paul Newman).

36. “Those with a moral deficit put on a good show, and sleep like a baby.” ~ (Paul Newman).

37. “Where the hell are the singing cats?” ~ (Paul Newman).

38. “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.” ~ (Paul Newman).

39. “The embarrassing thing is that my salad dressing is out-grossing my films.” ~ (Paul Newman).

40. “Newman’s second law: Just when things look darkest, they go black.” ~ (Paul Newman).

41. “There are three rules for running a business; fortunately, we don’t know any of them.” ~ (Paul Newman).

42. “I’ve been accused of being aloof. I’m not. I’m just wary.” ~ (Paul Newman).

43. “No sense in being a grifter if it’s the same as being a citizen.” ~ (Paul Newman).

44. “You say somebody’s guilty, everybody believes you. You say they’re innocent, nobody cares.” ~ (Paul Newman).

45. “I don’t think there’s anything exceptional or noble in being philanthropic. It’s the other attitude that confuses me.” ~ (Paul Newman).

Famous Paul Newman Quotes

46. “From salad dressings all blessings flow.” ~ (Paul Newman).

47. “What could be better than to hold your hand out to people less fortunate than you are?” ~ (Paul Newman).

48. “A feud should live a full and colorful life, and then it should die a natural death and be forgotten.” ~ (Paul Newman).

49. “The Alexander Technique helped a long-standing back problem and to get a good night’s sleep after many years of tossing and turning.” ~ (Paul Newman).

50. “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.” ~ (Paul Newman).

51. “What we got here is a failure to communicate.” ~ (Paul Newman).

52. “You can’t really appreciate anonymity until you’ve lost it. People say that’s sour grapes, but it really isn’t To be able to walk down the street without people paying attention to you is a real blessing and you lose it when you become an actor.” ~ (Paul Newman).

53. “Newman’s first law: It is useless to put on your brakes when you’re upside down.” ~ (Paul Newman).

54. “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.” ~ (Paul Newman).

55. “Twenty-five years ago I couldn’t walk down the street without being recognized. Now I can put a cap on, walk anywhere and no one pays me any attention. They don’t ask me about my movies and they don’t ask me about my salad dressing because they don’t know who I am. Am I happy about this? You bet.” ~ (Paul Newman).

56. “I never ask my wife about my flaws. Instead, I try to get her to ignore them and concentrate on my sense of humor.” ~ (Paul Newman).

57. “Our marriage works because we each carry clubs of equal weight and size.” ~ (Paul Newman).

58. “People like to do what they used to do after they’ve stopped being able to do it.” ~ (Paul Newman).

59. “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?’” ~ (Paul Newman).

60. “How many honest men do you know? Take the sinners away from the saints, you’re lucky to end up with Abraham Lincoln.” ~ (Paul Newman).

61. “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.” ~ (Paul Newman).

Short Paul Newman Quotes

62. “I’m a great believer in luck and the extraordinary role that plays in all of our lives.” ~ (Paul Newman).

63. “It’s been a privilege to be here.” ~ (Paul Newman).

64. “The only question I ever ask any woman is, ‘what time is your husband coming home?’” ~ (Paul Newman).

65. “I had no natural gift to be anything – not an athlete, not an actor, not a writer, not a director, a painter of garden porches – not anything. So I’ve worked really hard, because nothing ever came easily to me.” ~ (Paul Newman).

66. “To that extent that you can sustain and maintain that childlike part of your personality is probably the best part of acting.” ~ (Paul Newman).

67. “While progress should never come to a halt, there are many places it should never come to at all.” ~ (Paul Newman).

68. “To be an actor you have to be a child.” ~ (Paul Newman).

69. “Acting is like letting your pants down; you’re exposed.” ~ (Paul Newman).

70. “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.” ~ (Paul Newman).

71. “I’m a very competitive person. I always have been. And it’s hard to be competitive about something as amorphous as acting. But you can be competitive on the track, because the rules are very simple and the declaration of the winner is very concise.” ~ (Paul Newman).

72. “I was always a character actor. I just looked like Little Red Riding Hood.” ~ (Paul Newman).

73. “I can eat fifty eggs.” ~ (Paul Newman).

74. “People stay married because they want to, not because the doors are locked.” ~ (Paul Newman).

75. “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.” ~ (Paul Newman).

76. “I wasn’t driven to acting by any inner compulsion. I was running away from the sporting goods business.” ~ (Paul Newman).

77. “I certainly never expected to be a professional actor. I never expected to be in movies. I thought I would probably become a teacher.” ~ (Paul Newman).

78. “So I’ve worked really hard, because nothing ever came easily to me.” ~ (Paul Newman).

Inspiring Paul Newman Quotes

79. “Who’s to say who’s an expert?” ~ (Paul Newman).

80. “We’ve polluted the stratosphere with these chlorine and bromine compounds, and because it’s now colder, and because we have this change in the climate, we’re getting more ozone loss than we would have gotten in a normal year.” ~ (Paul Newman).

81. “Once I started taking drama classes, I asked myself why I had ever wasted so much time on a football team.” ~ (Paul Newman).

82. “Make sure you live life, which means don’t do things where you court celebrity and give something positive back to our society.” ~ (Paul Newman).

83. “I have an extraordinary attention span. I manage to juggle two or three different ideas at the same time, and that’s probably, if I have a gift, that’s probably the best gift that’s given me.” ~ (Paul Newman).

84. “It seems to me that the older I get, the more running around I do with less satisfaction, just spinning my wheels.” ~ (Paul Newman).

85. “The problem with getting older is you still remember how things used to be.” ~ (Paul Newman).

86. “Almost everything I learned about being an actor came from those early years at the Actor’s Studio.” ~ (Paul Newman).

87. “In the early days of films, the movie star in this country replaced royalty. They’ve been demoted since then but they’re still treated as beings larger than life.” ~ (Paul Newman).

88. “It’s really important to be attentive to the people who have less – who are less fortunate than you are.” ~ (Paul Newman).

89. “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.” ~ (Paul Newman).

90. “You can’t be as old as I am without waking up with a surprised look on your face every morning.” ~ (Paul Newman).

91. “Honey, Don’t go shooting all the dogs ’cause one of them’s got fleas.” ~ (Paul Newman).

92. “For those of you who like to scarf your popcorn in the sack, the good news is that Newman’s Own contains an aphrodisiac.” ~ (Paul Newman).

93. “I really just can’t watch myself. I see all the machinery at work and it just drives me nuts.” ~ (Paul Newman).

94. “I think Hollywood is in love with sequels. If it’s successful once, just jazz it up and shoot it out there again. I think it’s unfortunate.” ~ (Paul Newman).

95. “Fill the moment and find variety.” ~ (Paul Newman).

96. “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.” ~ (Paul Newman).

97. “The need is great and so are the opportunities to make a difference.” ~ (Paul Newman).

98. “I cannot bear to look at a film that I made before 1990. Maybe 1985. There’s no sense even trying to explain it. I really just can’t watch myself. I see all the machinery at work and it just drives me nuts, so I don’t look at anything.” ~ (Paul Newman).

99. “It’s absolutely amazing that I survived all the booze and smoking and the cars and the career.” ~ (Paul Newman).

100. “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.” ~ (Paul Newman).

101. “If I ever feel like I’m doing something I’ve done before, I scrap it and start over again.” ~ (Paul Newman).

102. “There are many ingredients that go into making a film. It baffles me, what works and what doesn’t.” ~ (Paul Newman).

103. “You discover a lot of things on your feet and if you don’t have any rehearsal, then anything that happens on the screen is by accident.” ~ (Paul Newman).

104. “I think transitions are never that noticeable, but they are always on their way. It has to do with distance and accessibility. People call it mellowing, but I think it’s how available you are toward other people, or how much you distance yourself.” ~ (Paul Newman).

105. “There are so many qualities that make up a human being… by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant.” ~ (Paul Newman).

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Short Biography of Paul Newman

Paul Newman born in 1925 in Cleveland Ohio grew from his early days in Shaker Heights to a Hollywood icon known for his striking blue eyes.

Initially involved in his family’s sporting goods store he pivoted to acting attending Yale’s School of Drama before making it big in New York.

His early struggle included a challenging debut film “The Silver Chalice” but he soon found success and critical acclaim particularly for roles like Rocky Graziano in “Somebody Up There Likes Me.”

Full Name	Paul Leonard Newman
Born	January 26, 1925 in Shaker Heights, Ohio, U.S.
Died	September 26, 2008 in Westport, Connecticut, U.S.
Education	Kenyon College (BA), Yale University
Occupations	Actor, film director, race car driver, philanthropist, entrepreneur
Height	1.77 m
Grandchildren	Henry Elkind, Peter Elkind
Organizations	SeriousFun Children’s Network, Safe Water Network
Children	6
Awards	Navy Good Conduct Medal

Newman’s personal life saw him marrying Joanne Woodward after a divorce with whom he shared a deep bond and three daughters.

His career spanned diverse roles eventually earning him an Oscar for “The Color of Money.”

Beyond acting Newman was passionate about race car driving and philanthropy founding “Newman’s Own” and contributing significantly to charity.

His marriage to Woodward lasted 50 years and he remained active in charitable work and racing until his passing in 2008 from lung cancer.

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Quick Facts about Paul Newman

• Paul Newman was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, on January 26, 1925.
• He attended Shaker Heights High School and Ohio University.
• Newman served in the US Navy during World War II.
• He made his Broadway debut in 1953 in “Picnic.”
• Newman won an Oscar for “The Color of Money.”
• He was passionate about race car driving and won several championships.
• Co-founded Newman’s Own, donating over $570 million to charity.
• Founded the Serious Fun Children’s Network for ill children.
• Newman voiced Doc Hudson in Pixar’s “Cars.”
• Color-blindness prevented his dream of becoming a pilot.
• Known for pranking friends and colleagues.
• Newman was on President Nixon’s enemies list due to his political activism.
• An ear infection saved him from a deadly kamikaze attack during WWII.
• Initially aimed for a sports career before turning to acting.
• Disliked his performance in his first film, “The Silver Chalice.”
• Married to Joanne Woodward for 50 years.
• Turned down a role in “Jaws.”
• Didn’t enjoy dressing up and preferred casual attire.
• Mistaken for Marlon Brando early in his career.
• Supported civil rights, attending the 1963 March on Washington.
• Newman’s Own has donated $460 million to charities.
• Acted in “The Hustler” and “Cool Hand Luke,” earning critical acclaim.
• Active in environmental causes.
• Had a successful entrepreneurial venture with Newman’s Own.
• Starred in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” with Robert Redford.
• Returned to Broadway in 2002 in “Our Town.”
• Vocal supporter of the Democratic Party.
• Newman’s Own salad dressing is a brand favorite.
• Known for his kindness and humility.
• Nominated for an Academy Award for “The Verdict.”
• Inspired actors and filmmakers with his talent.
• Starred in film adaptations of Tennessee Williams’ plays.
• Won his first Academy Award with “The Color of Money.”
• Major contributions to charity from Newman’s Own profits.
• Dedicated to his acting craft.
• Began his love story with Joanne Woodward in “The Long, Hot Summer.”
• His appeal spanned generations.
• Received multiple awards including Golden Globes and an honorary César.
• Worked with George Roy Hill in iconic films.
• Advocated for gun control and supported stricter firearm regulations.

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Top Questions about Paul Newman