14 Charming Quotes From Sir Patrick Stewart

English award-winning actor Sir Patrick Stewart has passed away at the age of 86. The Star Trek icon, who started his acting career in Shakespeare theater, reportedly died on October 28 after “a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia,” says his spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak.

Whether you knew him as Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard, X-Men’s Professor Charles Xavier, or his many theater performances, it would be hard not to love the late actor. The oft-honored septuagenarian proved to be an incredible presence on stage or screen. To remember him after his death, let’s take a look at some of the beloved Brit’s most quotable insights.

1. On Shakespeare

“Having spent so much of my life with Shakespeare’s world, passions and ideas in my head and in my mouth, he feels like a friend—someone who just went out of the room to get another bottle of wine.”

From an interview with The Telegraph.

2. On becoming active on X (fka Twitter)

"It has really taken us [Stewart and his wife, Sunny Ozell] by surprise to what extent people have enjoyed it. I get a great deal of satisfaction from using it for societal issues and concerns that I am involved with, but there’s also been this element of playfulness, which has opened up a new avenue of communication, which I am enjoying very much indeed."

From an interview with Time Out New York.

3. On politics

"I’ve always believed that it is not possible to be in the world and not be political."

From an interview with New York Magazine's Vulture blog.

4. On what he found attractive

“Talent has always been the sexiest thing to me. I have missed out on innumerable, shall I call them, ‘romantic opportunities’ because the other person involved wasn’t very good at what they did.”

From an interview with New York Magazine's Vulture blog.

5. On the future potential of technologically advanced humans

"I think that for the moment, at least, we are as good as it gets. And the good, the potential good in us is still to be explored...so that we can become better human beings to ourselves as well as to others. And I sometimes feel we’re only at the threshold of those discoveries."

From an interview with Smithsonian.

6. On achieving fame

“I’d been given a voice that I didn’t know was available to me, and it was to speak seriously and with a proper level of involvement on issues of inequality and unfairness.”

From an interview with New York Magazine's Vulture blog.

7. On his work against domestic violence

“The people who could do most to improve the situation of so many women and children are in fact, men. It’s in our hands to stop violence against women.”

From a Q&A session at Comicpalooza. Read about Patrick Stewart's personal experience with domestic violence in an article he wrote for The Guardian.

8. Advice for young actors

“If someone says ‘Give me one word of advice,’ I say ‘be fearless.’ And knowing without any shadow of a doubt that what they have to give—who they are—is totally unique and not shared by anybody else. And to believe in that uniqueness. It took me decades before I developed courage as an actor.”

From an interview with TheaterMania.com.

9. On first developing a friendship with Sir Ian McKellen

“I think it was when I began to find out that this actor that I had admired from afar for so long had so many things in common with me—background, interests, passion about Shakespeare, passion about being on stage in front of live audiences.”

From TimesTalks via YouTube.com.

10. On playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard

“I loved that character. I admired him—that was one of the nice things about being him."

From TimesTalks via YouTube.com.

11. And on his appreciation for the role

“Being cast as Jean-Luc Picard was the most significant thing that ever happened to me because there wasn’t an area of my life that it didn’t touch, mostly for the better."

From an interview with The Telegraph.

12. On the moral message in his work

“Is it enough, [Waiting for Godot] asks, to have written King Lear and Hamlet, Twelfth Night and the sonnets? The answer is unequivocally clear: how you live is as important as what you do. That’s how it has seemed to me all my life.”

From an interview with The Telegraph.

13. On his favorite childhood food memory

"Well, I was born in 1940. My father was serving in the army, but when the war was over we went away for a day to the seaside. My father popped into a store, and when he came out, he told me to close my eyes. He put something in my hand that felt so weird, I snatched my hand away. I looked down, and on the sidewalk was this yellowy-pinky furry-looking fruit. It was a peach! It was the most exotic taste I’d ever experienced."

From an interview with Bon Appetit.

14. On anticipating his legacy

"A couple of years ago, I was asked, ‘How would you like to be remembered?' And my answer was ‘That I was very funny.’"

From an interview with Esquire.

Growing up in England, Stewart pursued acting after a teacher introduced him to Shakespeare. “A 400-year-old writer reached out a hand in invitation to me that morning,” he recalled in a feature for The Guardian on reading The Merchant of Venice. “I felt a sense of an internal, private me being released and connecting with something mysterious, alien and exciting. I was hooked.”

Among stints at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre, Stewart appeared in episodes of popular TV shows early in his career, including Coronation Street. His big breakout role, of course, came in the late 1980s, when he first portrayed Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, a role he reprised all the way until 2023, most recently starring in the spinoff Star Trek: Picard.

Stewart was nominated for four Emmy Awards, three Golden Globes, three Grammy Awards, and three Actor Awards (fka the SAG Awards).

Rest in peace, Sir Patrick Stewart.

A version of this story was published in 2015; it has been updated in 2026.