Walt Disney is one of the most fascinating people in history. His work and life have inspired millions of people worldwide, and his legacy continues to live on today. Walt had been interested in drawing since he was a kid and would spend hours drawing on any piece of paper he could find. His parents encouraged him to draw as much as possible and allowed him to attend art classes to cultivate his talent.
A pioneer of the American animation industry and a popular showman, he introduced several developments in the production of cartoons. He had a dream of making something special, and he did it. He also ensured that it was something people could enjoy together as a family; that’s why his work stands the test of time. Disney’s animation studio was responsible for creating some of the most famous and beloved animated characters in history. From Mickey Mouse to Donald Duck, he marked the childhood of generations and produced some of the best animated movies, which became works of art. As a film producer, he holds the record for most Academy Awards earned by an individual, having won or received 26 Oscars from 59 nominations!
Despite his apparent bubbly personality, those who knew him said he was actually a quite shy, insecure, and lonely man, the perfect representation of a genius. But at the same time, he was a perfectionist. He wanted his work to be the best of the best. You can’t help but love Walt Disney because he loved what he gifted us. That’s why we want to pay homage to his work with a collection of the best quotes by Walt Disney!
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"It’s a mistake not to give people a chance to learn to depend on themselves while they are young."
"Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards – the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings."
"All you’ve got to do is own up to your ignorance honestly, and you’ll find people who are eager to fill your head with information."
“That’s what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.”
“I started, actually, to make my first animated cartoon in 1920. Of course, they were very crude things then and I used sort of little puppet things.”
"Do a good job. You don’t have to worry about the money; it will take care of itself. Just do your best work — then try to trump it."
"When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do. And one thing it takes to accomplish something is courage."
"Childishness? I think it’s the equivalent of never losing your sense of humor. I mean, there’s a certain something that you retain. It’s the equivalent of not getting so stuffy that you can’t laugh at others."
"Animation is different from other parts. It's language is the language of caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon’s unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals."
“Until a character becomes a personality it cannot be believed. Without personality, the character may do funny or interesting things, but unless people are able to identify themselves with the character, its actions will seem unreal. And without personality, a story cannot ring true to the audience.”
"I think you have to know these fellows definitely before you can draw them. When you start to caricature a person, you can’t do it without knowing the person. Take Laurel and Hardy for example; everybody can see Laurel doing certain things because they know Laurel."
"You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world, but it requires people to make the dream a reality."
"I have never been interested in personal gain or profit. This business and this studio have been my entire life."
“By nature I’m an experimenter. To this day, I don’t believe in sequels. I can’t follow popular cycles. I have to move on to new things. So with the success of Mickey, I was determined to diversify.”
“To all who come to this happy place: Welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past—and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams and the hard facts that have created America—with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world.”
“I never called my work an ‘art’. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.”
“Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows.”
"After the rain, the sun will reappear. There is life. After the pain, the joy will still be here."
"People often ask me if I know the secret of success and if I could tell others how to make their dreams come true. My answer is, you do it by working."
"Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource – the minds of our children."
"Adults are interested if you don’t play down to the little 2 or 3 year old's or talk down. I don’t believe in talking down to children. I don’t believe in talking down to any certain segment. I like to kind of just talk in a general way to the audience. Children are always reaching."
"Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination. But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it."
"When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human; and that is the secret of his popularity."
"Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world."
"We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us."
“Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.”
"When I was a kid, a book I read advised young artists to be themselves. That decided it for me. I was a corny kind of guy, so I went in for corn."
"I dream, I test my dreams against my beliefs, I dare to take risks, and I execute my vision to make those dreams come true."
“I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it.”
"I’d say it’s been my biggest problem all my life… It’s money. It takes a lot of money to make these dreams come true."
"I have no use for people who throw their weight around as celebrities, or for those who fawn over you just because you are famous."
“We share, to a large extent, one another’s fate. We help create those circumstances which favor or challenge us in meeting our objectives and realizing our dreams.”
“Everyone needs deadlines. Even the beavers. They loaf around all summer, but when they are faced with the winter deadline, they work like fury. If we didn’t have deadlines, we’d stagnate.”
“To the youngsters of today, I say believe in the future, the world is getting better; there still is plenty of opportunity.”
“There is great comfort and inspiration in the feeling of close human relationships and its bearing on our mutual fortunes – a powerful force, to overcome the “tough breaks” which are certain to come to most of us from time to time.”
"I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter."
"All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me… You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you."
"I do not make films primarily for children. I make them for the child in all of us, whether he be six or sixty. Call the child innocence."
"I have long felt that the way to keep children out of trouble is to keep them interested in things."
"Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world."
"In our animation we must show only the actions and reactions of a character, but we must picture also with the action... The feeling of those characters."
"I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters – to make them personalities."
"Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language."
"Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner."
"I don’t want the public to see the world they live in while they’re in the Park (Disneyland). I want to feel they’re in another world."
"I could never convince the financiers that Disneyland was feasible, because dreams offer too little collateral."
“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
"Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood."
"I am corny, you know? But I think there are just about 140 million people in this country who are just as corny as I am."
"I am in no sense of the word a great artist, not even a great animator; I have always had men working for me whose skills were greater than my own. I am an idea man."
"Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is coordinating those who work with me and aiming their efforts at a certain goal."
"I don’t like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It’s just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess."
“The greatest moments in life are not concerned with selfish achievements but rather with the things we do for the people we love and esteem, and whose respect we need.”
“I think it’s important to have a good hard failure when you’re young. I learned a lot out of that. Because it makes you kind of aware of what can happen to you.”
“Fantasy, if it’s really convincing, can’t become dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time.”
“The more you are in a state of gratitude, the more you will attract things to be grateful for.”
“Part of the Disney success is our ability to create a believable world of dreams that appeals to all age groups. The kind of entertainment we create is meant to appeal to every member of the family.”
Somehow I can’t believe that there are any heights that can’t be scaled by a man who knows the secrets of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four C's. They are curiosity, confidence, courage, and constancy.
"Leadership means that a group, large or small, is willing to entrust authority to a person who has shown judgment, wisdom, personal appeal, and proven competence."
"The important thing is the family. If you can keep the family together — and that’s the backbone of our whole business, catering to families — that’s what we hope to do."
"A person should set his goals as early as he can and devote all his energy and talent to getting there. With enough effort, he may achieve it. Or he may find something that is even more rewarding. But in the end, no matter what the outcome, he will know he has been alive."
"Courage is the main quality of leadership, in my opinion, no matter where it is exercised. Usually it implies some risk — especially in new undertakings. Courage to initiate something and to keep it going, pioneering and adventurous spirit to blaze new ways, often, in our land of opportunity."
"Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature."
"I don’t believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn’t treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should."
“All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.”
"Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money."
"We did it Disneyland, in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster – closed and forgotten within the first year."
"I take great pride in the artistic development of cartoons. Our characters are made to go through emotions."
"I wanted to retain my individuality. I was afraid of being hampered by studio policies. I knew if someone else got control, I would be restrained."
"I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained."
"I am interested in entertaining people, in bringing pleasure, particularly laughter, to others, rather than being concerned with ‘expressing’ myself with obscure creative impressions."
"Whenever I go on a ride, I’m always thinking of what’s wrong with the thing and how it can be improved."
“We believed in our idea: a family park where parents and children could have fun—together.”
"Why do we have to grow up? I know more adults who have the children’s approach to life. They’re people who don’t give a hang what the Jones’ do. You see them at Disneyland every time you go there. They are not afraid to be delighted with simple pleasures, and they have a degree of contentment with what life has brought – sometimes it isn’t much, either."
"Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation."
"I think a good study of music would be indispensable to the animators — a realization on their part of how primitive music is, how natural it is for people to want to go to music — a study of rhythm, the dance — the various rhythms enter into our lives every day."
"At first the cartoon medium was just a novelty, but it never really began to hit until we had more than tricks… Until we developed personalities. We had to get beyond getting a laugh. They may roll in the aisles, but that doesn’t mean you have a great picture. You have pathos in the thing."
Here, I fixed the title: Walt Disney: the "wonderful" racist, sexist, pro-Nazi man who founded an empire that to this day still has issues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_The_Walt_Disney_Company)
Here, I fixed the title: Walt Disney: the "wonderful" racist, sexist, pro-Nazi man who founded an empire that to this day still has issues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_The_Walt_Disney_Company)
