20 Keanu Reeves’ Quotes That Perfectly Show the Insightful Man He Is

Keanu Reeves is widely beloved and even gained the status of “Internet’s boyfriend.” He won everyone’s hearts either for his diverse acting roles or his enigmatic and down-to-earth personality. Throughout the years of giving interviews, he has shared profound insights on various aspects of life and career. Despite being a private person, he has imparted wisdom on topics like grief, love, and navigating career expectations. We collected a few of Reeves’s thought-provoking quotes to offer a glimpse into his unique view of the world.

On life and love

• The passage of time has given me the wisdom to slow down and appreciate everything more. When you’re not in such a rush, you allow things to start to happen more slowly and you feel a deeper connection to your life.

• I think you do all you can for the ones you love. And that can turn into understanding a little bit of what other people go through. Being able to understand that, and share some of it, you see if maybe there are things that you can do. Knowing that perhaps you can offer something, if they’re in a situation or in a moment that isn’t clear, or they feel like they don’t know how to be or what to do. If someone comes to you for help — that shared experience, where you can have a conversation. You haven’t walked in their shoes, but you know a bit of the road that they’ve been on.

• If you’re a lover, you have to be a fighter. Because if you don’t fight for your love, what kind of love do you have?

• When you’re young you have a big old reel of that tape left, right? And so it appears to revolve slowly. Then, time passes, and there’s less and less tape left on the reel. It spins faster.

• We can always do more. There’s no ceiling on that. And you can’t do everything. You can’t do it all.

• I don’t think you ever work through it. Grief and loss, those are things that don’t ever go away. They stay with you.

• The intent is that if you’ve got the blues and a little melancholia then perhaps laugh. Then you might find it deliciously, horribly funny.

• I know the ones who love us will miss us [after we die].

On work

• I think the power of cinema — part of it is its novelty, but also its scale. You see a close-up of a wonderful performance with emotions and storytelling that touch you. Whether it’s horror or action or comedy, you’re seeing a face that’s, you know, 20 feet tall. You’re, like, there. The intimacy of that.

• As I see it, the job is about investigating ’Why?’, investigating ’How come?’ You enter into a collaboration with a director to get those answers. When you don’t have an agreement, when you have conflict — and, yeah, there have been situations where my relationship with the director has been at odds, I might have been emotionally immature sometimes — then it becomes a battle in the editing room. Luckily I’ve only had a couple of those instances.

• Working a lot and constantly moving from one film set to another has been important in helping me overcome some of the more painful times in my life. Every film set gives me the feeling that I’m part of a new family and I feel fortunate to be able to have a job that gives me a lot of satisfaction. But I still work at finding more inner strength and wisdom and hopefully look towards the future with greater optimism.

• With any character, the way I think about it is, you have the role on the page, you have the vision of the director and you have your life experience.

• For me, it’s cool when a work of art can entertain but also be inspirational or challenging or hold the mirror up. It’s much more rewarding because it means that you’re getting into it. Asking questions. Looking at the diamond and seeing which ways the light refracts and reflects. It can be everything from ’Be excellent to each other’ in the circumstances of Bill and Ted, and those characters going against all odds, to The Matrix, which is, you know, ’What truth?’

• [I’ll keep working] as far as my legs can take me. As far as the audience wants to go.

• Honestly, I try not to do anything I don’t want to do.

• I have been a part of some films that have been embraced and I am very grateful. They have changed my life. They have given me life. They have provided life. And I am very grateful to the people who have enjoyed these films.

On fame and privacy

• I’ve always kept my distance from all the fame. I never lived my life as a function of what was said or written about me. I just love the way I’m still as interested in acting as I ever was. Acting has always given me a structure and purpose in life and I’ve never found anything else to invest myself in the way I do when I’m acting or working on films.

• I know there’s this impression of me out there but I’m not lonely. I don’t have a lot of close friends, but I like living quietly and being private. That’s the way I am and I have a lot of interesting projects going on that I’m very happy about.

• I don’t think of myself as a role model or anything like that. If people have had any impact from however they interact with me — in terms of entertainment or in real life or on social media — I just hope it’s been positive.

• I lead a very quiet, normal, kind of — really, my private life is a boring disaster.

Going through Keanu Reeves’ quotes isn’t the only way you can get a new perspective on life and other matters. Regular people often take to social media to share their mind-blowing stories, which can be in and of itself an impactful life lesson.