Alejandro Jodorowsky famous quotes

Failure doesn't mean anything, it just means changing paths.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Mean #Path

Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Thinking #Bird #Flying

You live in the image you have of the world. Every one of us lives in a different world, with different space and different time.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Space #Different #World

Awakening is not a thing. It is not a goal, not a concept. It is not something to be attained. It is a metamorphosis. If the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become, saying ‘And then I shall have wings and antennae,’ there will never be a butterfly. The caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. When the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Butterfly #Thinking #Wings

Maybe if literature was prohibited the same way as cocaine, people out of pure curiosity would try to get a couple of lines
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Couple #People #Curiosity

The only thing a master can teach is how to learn about yourself. There are no secrets. They are only techniques to waken yourself.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Secret #Technique #Masters

What I am trying to do when I use symbols is to awaken in your unconscious some reaction. I am very conscious of what I am using because symbols can be very dangerous. When we use normal language we can defend ourselves because our society is a linguistic society, a semantic society. But when you start to speak, not with words, but only with images, the people cannot defend themselves.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#People #Trying #Our Society

When the bull's-eye becomes as big in your mind as an elephant, you are sure to hit it.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Success #Eye #Elephants

For a true artist, difficulties become opportunities and clouds become solid present.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Inspirational #Artist #Opportunity

Let the inner god that is in each one of us speak. The temple is your body, and the priest is your heart: it is from here that every awareness must begin.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Heart #Body #Temples

One day, someone showed me a glass of water that was half full. And he said, "Is it half full or half empty?" So I drank the water. No more problem.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Inspirational #Philosophical #Glasses

We all exist in our own personal reality of craziness.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Reality #Craziness

Normality is to be different. Every person is a different person. And one day you need to be aware of your difference. Aware that you are not the same as the others. That is to be normal.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Differences #One Day #Different

Birds born in cages think that flying is a disease.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Thinking #Bird #Flying

And I imagine... with great pleasure... all the horrible stirrings of the nonmanifested to bring forth the scream which creates the universe. Maybe one day I'll see you trembling, and you'll go into convulsion and grow larger and smaller until your mouth opens and the world will come from your mouth, escaping through the window like a river, and it will flood the city. And then we'll begin to live.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Escaping #Cities #Rivers

You can’t have a masterpiece without madness,
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Madness #Masterpiece

I wanted to make a film that gave the people who took LSD at that time the hallucinations that you get with that drug, but without hallucinating,
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#People #Drug #Hallucinations

If art is not a medicine for the society, it is a poison.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Art #Medicine #Poison

I have an ambition to live 300 years. I will not live 300 years. Maybe I will live one year more. But I have the ambition. Why you will not have ambition? Why? Have the greatest ambition possible. You want to be immortal? Fight to be immortal. Do it. You want to make the most fantastic art or movie? Try. If you fail, is not important. We need to try.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Art #Ambition #Fighting

I believe in mysticism, with an interior goal, and you are your own temple and your own priest. I dont believe anymore in religions, because you see today there are religious wars, prejudice, false morals, and the woman is despised. Religion is too old now; its from another century, its not for today.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Religious #War #Believe

I am like the rain, I go where I'm needed,
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Rain #Needed

The apocalypse is now! Americans know this, that the only hope is the flying saucers. Do you know how I see the world? Like a person who is dying. It's a worm who is dying to make a butterfly. We must not stop the worm from dying, we must help the worm to die to help the butterfly to be born. We need to dance with death. This world is dying, but very well. We will make a big, big enormous butterfly. You and I will be the first movements in the wings of the butterfly because we are speaking like this.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Butterfly #Wings #Flying

I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Drug #Cinema #Psychedelic

One does not go to the theater to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery that we all are.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Doe #Mystery #Theater

The mole is an animal that digs passages searching for the sun. Sometimes he reaches the surface. When he looks at the sun he goes blind.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Animal #Moles #Looks

I live making comics. Comics is an industrial art but less suffering, because comics are for young people who are more adventurous. I do that. I live off comics, and then I write books, but when you want movies, you cannot make movies without money.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Art #Book #Writing

Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Tragedy #Together #Mixing

My father was a monster. A monster! I cut with my family when I was 23 and I never see them again.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Father #Cutting #Monsters

I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Art #Soul #Intellectual

Movies have heart. Have mind. Have power. Have ambition.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Heart #Ambition #Mind

My wife is 37 years younger than me. I don't feel the difference.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Years #Differences #Wife

I don't live in France; I live in myself.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#France

Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Eye #Directors #Film

I want to liberate my imagination and my mind with every kind of movie. That is what I wanted to do all my life.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Imagination #Mind #Want

My consciousness is without limits more than when I was 40 or 50.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Limits #Consciousness

Every one of us is a perfect human being, deformed by the family, the society and the culture.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Perfect #Culture #Humans

If you are great, 'El Topo' is a great picture. If you are limited, 'El Topo' is limited.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

When I was a young person I went to the university and I learned a rational language, to think with the left side of the brain. But in the right side of the brain you have intuition and imagination. Words are not the truth; they indicate the way to go, but you need to go alone, in silence. Symbols have a language that kills the words.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Thinking #Imagination #Silence

I am not a normal person. I am living in a normal body, but my mind is not normal.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Mind #Body #Normal

I believe in mysticism, with an interior goal, and you are your own temple and your own priest.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Believe #Goal #Temples

My writing routine is everyday I put a record on, the same one since 20 years. Then I burn a stick of incense, I put perfume here on the insides of my soles, I paint my left ***** red, and I write.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Writing #Years #Everyday

You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Gold #Change Yourself

One becomes wise only in measures, as he goes through his own insanity.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Wise #Insanity

I was raping Frank Herbert but with love.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Frank

For art to be art it has to cure.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Art #Cures

I think the art of filmmaking is something you learn through actions, by doing it, not by learning theories. And as you do it, your mind starts to change.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Art #Thinking #Mind

The first thing I didn't understand was my life. It's a mystery. And today I don't understand economy or politics. I don't know why politics or economy are destroying the world, but I will understand after understanding.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Understanding #World #Today

I don't see myself as a moviemaker only, you know? When I can do a picture, I do. But I don't work like a business, in pictures. I am not obliged to make one picture after the other in order to live.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Order

People say I am mad. I am not mad. I am trying to heal my soul.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#People #Mad #Soul

A man doesn't cry. In my life, I've never cried. I cannot do it. I am a man. How will I cry?
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Men #Cry

I don't regret any past. I am not there. I am not sorry not to make pictures, because I know one day I will do it. I intend to live 150 years.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Sorry #Regret #Past

I am not a commercial industry creator. I don't believe in making art to make money.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Art #Believe #Making Money

Don't make your living with cinema because Hollywood will take you, will eat you, will destroy you. This is the reality. You have a good picture, have success, you take the person and they destroy you.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Reality #Hollywood #Cinema

The planet is ill, everyone knows that. But I need to be optimistic, otherwise I would just be adding to the negativity. So every night I come on Madrid TV and read a piece of good news.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Optimistic #Night #Negativity

I write books, I write for comic books, I give lectures... I live. And when the opportunity comes to do a picture, I do a picture.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Book #Writing #Opportunity

Five cats and a woman. That is all I need in life.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky

#Cat #Needs