Everything You Need to Know About Parenting in 11 Tom Hanks Quotes

What can you learn from a guy who made you believe that he, a 30-year-old man, was really a 13-year-old boy? A lot, actually. Our friends at Fatherly collected the best parenting wisdom from Tom Hanks.

Getty | James Devaney

Tom Hanks is known for playing heroic people: Apollo 13's Jim Lovell. Saving Private Ryan's Captain Miller. But, as far as your kid is concerned, Toy Story's Woody is the only one that matters. He's also won showbiz's unofficial "Mr. Congeniality" award 36 years running. Now, with his turn as Captain Sully Sullenberger in Sully, Clint Eastwood's adaptation of the airplane that landed on the Hudson, Hanks continues this trend of being a goddamn national treasure. But what can you learn from a guy who made you believe that he, a 30-year-old man, was really a 13-year-old boy? Here's the collected wisdom from T.Hanx.

On Pursuing Plumbing Passions

"There isn't any great mystery about me. What I do is glamorous and has an awful lot of white-hot attention placed on it. But the actual work requires the same discipline and passion as any job you love doing, be it as a very good pipe fitter or a highly creative artist."

On Sizing Up Humanity

"I think 80 percent of the population are really great, caring people who will help you and tell you the truth. That's just the way it is. And I think 20 percent of the population are crooks and liars. It's just a fact."

On the Importance of Dad Jokes

"If you're funny — if there's something that makes you laugh — then every day's going to be okay."

On Being a Woke Man

"We are in the Third Millennium. We have thousands of years of human history under our belts. If we are not continuously moving towards equal rights, equal opportunities, and equal freedoms for every member of the human race — not just that half that is male — then we have squandered all we have learned."

On Why You Can Only Hope to Measure Up to Grandpa

"Larger-than-life characters make up about .01 percent of the world's population. By and large, it was all elbows and asses on that beach, guys scared to death. Maybe if you're really good, you're able to operate on pure instinct as opposed to pure panic. We won the war because of ordinary guys who did the right thing at the right time."

On How Your Parents Think of Social Media

"Tweeting is like sending out cool telegrams to your friends once a week."

On Get It Together Space X

"If they could offer up a way to go to the moon that wouldn't kill you, I'd sign up."

On Thinking Before You Post on Instagram

"No journalist has ever been in my house and no photographs have ever been taken of where I live. I don't parade my family out for display, which is the way it will stay."

On Not Taking Good Fortune For Granted

"My kid could get a bad x-ray and I could get a call from the doctor saying I have something growing in my bum and that would change my perspective on everything instantaneously, on what is and what is not important."

On Having a Storybook Romance

"It's just as hard . . . staying happily married as it is doing movies."

On How Being an Actor Is Just Like Being a Parent

"There are days when I know that three o'clock tomorrow afternoon I am going to have to deliver some degree of emotional goods, and if I can't do it, that means I'm going to have to fake it. If I fake it, that means they might catch me at faking it, and if they catch me at faking it, well, then it's just doomsday."