Walt Disney Quotes

I don't want to please everybody. I'd get a little worried if I did something and everybody was pleased with it.

Animals have personalities like people and must be studied.

Happiness is a state of mind.

I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities.

My greatest reward is that I have been able to build this wonderful organization.

I know different ways of looking at things. I have my stockholders, and I feel a very keen responsibility to the shareholders, but I feel that the main responsibility I have to them is to have the stock appreciate. And you only have it appreciate by reinvesting as much as you can back in the business. And that's what we've done ... and that has been my philosophy on running the business.

Moving pictures can be and will be new and fresh and exciting as long as there are ideas and talent in the world.

Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.

I've always had a feeling that any time you can experiment, you ought to do it. Because you never know what will happen.

I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn't know how to get along without it.

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.

Fantasy and reality often overlap.

The same thing could have happened on Halloween if somebody in the neighborhood had jumped out and scared him.

Besides, you don't work for a dollar - you work to create and have fun.

Biggest problem? Well, I'd say it's been my biggest problem all my life. MONEY. It takes a lot of money to make these dreams come true. From the very start it was a problem. Getting the money to open Disneyland. About seventeen million it took. And we had everything mortgaged including my personal insurance.

When I was poor living in a garage in Kansas I began to draw the mice that scampered over my desk. That is how Mickey Mouse was born.

Today we are shapers of the world of tomorrow.

Both my study of Scripture and my career in entertaining children have taught me to cherish them.

We grew to our present size almost against ourselves. It was not a deliberately planned commercial venture in the sense that I sat down and said that we were going to make ourselves into a huge financial octopus. We evolved by necessity. We did not sit down and say to ourselves, 'How can we make a big pile of dough?' It just happened.

Just make sure you never do less than your best

We felt that the public, and especially the children, like animals that are cute and little. I think we are rather indebted to Charlie Chaplin for the idea. We wanted something appealing, and we thought of a tiny bit of a mouse that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin- a little fellow trying to do the best he could.

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.

All of our dreams can come true.

Mickey was simply a little personality assigned to the purposes of laughter.

Disneyland is something that will never be finished. It's something that I can keep developing. It will be a live, breathing thing that will need change. A picture is a thing, once you wrap it up and turn it over to Technicolor, you're through. Snow White is a dead issue with me. But I can change the park, because it's alive.

Every leader is telling a story ... about what he or she values.

All right. I'm corny. But I think there's just about a-hundred-and-forty-million people in this country that are just as corny as I am.

I'm not the perfectionist anymore. It's my staff. They're the ones always insisting on doing something better and better.

Disneyland will always be building and growing and adding new things ... new ways of having fun, of learning things, and sharing the many exciting adventures which may be experienced here in the company of family and friends.

There's nothing funnier than the human animal.

It's no secret that we were sticking just about every nickel we had on the chance that people would really be interested in something totally new and unique in the field of entertainment.

The wonders of nature are endless ...

I don't pretend to know anything about art. I make pictures for entertainment, and then the professors tell me what they mean.

Don't tell me about the problems - I make the problems.

The life and ventures of Mickey Mouse have been closely bound up with my own personal and professional life.

Do anything better than it was ever done before and youll get rich.

I could never convince the financiers that Disneyland was feasible because dreams offer too little collateral.

I've always been bored with just making money. I've wanted to do things; I wanted to build things, to get something going. What money meant to me was that I was able to get money to do that for me.

One thing it takes to accomplish something is courage.

A prayer, it seems to me, implies a promise as well as a request; at the highest level, prayer not only is a supplication for strength and guidance, but also becomes an affirmation of life and thus a reverent praise of God.

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.

Life is beautiful. It's about giving. It's about family.

It feels good when it helps to get a good seat for a football game. But it never helped me make a good film or a good shot in a polo game, or command the obedience of my daughter. It doesn

You don't build it for yourself. You know what the people want and you build it for them.

While the worriers are worrying, the planners are planning and the accountants are figuring out why we can't afford it, I'm busy getting started.

Happiness is a state of mind. You can be happy or you can be unhappy.

Why would I want to be president? I'm the king of Disneyland.

Sheer animated fantasy is still my first and deepest production impulse.

Tomorrow can be a wonderful age.

I first saw the site for Disneyland back in 1953, In those days it was all flat land - no rivers, no mountains, no castles or rocket ships - just orange groves, and a few acres of walnut trees.

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.

Too many people grow up. That's the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up. They forget. They don't remember what it's like to be 12 years old. They patronize, they treat children as inferiors. Well I won't do that.

It's a mistake not to give people a chance to learn to depend on themselves while they are young.

There is no magic in magic, it's all in the details.

My persistence is the measure of the belief I have in myself.

Animation is different from other parts. Its 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.

We believed in our idea - a family park where parents and children could have fun- together.

I can never stand still. I must explore and experiment. I am never satisfied with my work. I resent the limitations of my own imagination.

Many of the things that seem impossible now will become realities tomorrow.

Adults are interested if you don't play down to the little 2 or 3 year olds 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.

In bad times and in good I've never lost my sense of zest for life.

It's something that will never be finished. Something that I can keep developing ... and adding to.

The worst of us is not without innocence,although buried deeply it might be.

I do not want to make teaching films. If I did, I would create a separate organization. It is not higher education that interests me so much as general mass education.

People look at you and me to see what they are supposed to be. And, if we don't disappoint them, maybe, just maybe, they won't disappoint us.

The era we are living in today is a dream of coming true.

The way I see it, Disneyland will never be finished.

I only hope that we don't lose sight of one thing - that it was all started by a mouse.

My business is making people, especially children, happy.

When I was a kid, a book I read advised young artist to be themselves. That decided it for me. I was a corny kind of guy, so I went in for corn.

Give the public everything you can give them, keep the place as clean as you can keep it, keep it friendly.

I never called my work an 'art'. It's part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

I am not interested in what a man can't do. I want to know what he CAN do.

Women are the best judges of anything we turn out. Their taste is very important. They are the theatergoers; they are the ones who drag the men in. If the women like it, to heck with the men.

I just want it to look like nothing else in the world. And it should be surrounded by a train.

Behind every great amusement park is a great fan site.

Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America.

Money-or rather the lack of it to carry out my ideas-may worry me, but it does not excite me.

If I depended on critics and children to make a living I'd grow broke.

I don't think there's a thing I own that I will ever get the benefit of except through doing things with it.

You know, the only way I've found to make these pictures is with animators. You can't seem to do it with accountants and bookkeepers.

I have a great love of animals and laughter.

In most instances, the driving force behind the action is the mood, the personality, the attitude of the character - or all three. Therefore, the mind is the pilot. We think of things before the body does them.

People spend money when and where they feel good.

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.

Togetherness, for me, means teamwork. In my business of motion pictures and television entertainment, many minds and skillful hands must collaborate ... T he work seeks to comprehend the spiritual and material needs and yearnings of gregarious humanity. It makes us reflect how completely dependent we are upon one another in our social and commercial life.

Main Street, U.S.A. is America at the turn of the century
the crossroads of an era. The gas lamps and the electric lamp
the horse-drawn car and auto car. Main Street is everyone's hometown- the heart line of America.

It is my wish to delight all members of the family, young and old, parent and child.

Any dream is possible, if you have courage.

There is nothing wrong with good schmaltz, nothing wrong with good heart ... The critics think I'm kind of corny. Well, I am corny. As long as people respond to it, I'm okay.

The main quality of leadership ... is courage ! If you can dream it, you can do it!

To me, today, at age sixty-one, all prayer, by the humble or highly placed, has one thing in common: supplication for strength and inspiration to carry on the best human impulses which should bind us together for a better world.

We love to entertain kings and queens, but at Disneyland, everyone is a V.I.P.

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.

Speaking for the one field which I feel definitely qualified to comment on, I fully believe the animated picture will emerge as one of the greatest mediums, not only of entertainment but also of education.

Believe in your dreams, no matter how impossible they seem.

Disneyland is a work of love.

Being a celebrity doesn't even seem to keep the fleas off our dogs - and if being a celebrity won't give me an advantage over a couple of fleas, then I guess there can't be much in being a celebrity after all.

I just make what I like - warm and human stories, ones about historic characters and events, and about animals. If there is a secret, I guess it's that I never make the pictures too childish, but always try to get in a little satire of adult foibles.