Alejandro Jodorowsky > Quotes

“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“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

“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

“Failure doesn't mean anything, it just means changing paths.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“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

“I don't live in France, I live in myself.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“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

“For a true artist, difficulties become opportunities and clouds become solid present.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“El amor es un intercambio de silencios.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“During a party, Luis Buñuel, seduced by Carrington’s beauty and emboldened by the notion that she had transcended all bourgeois morality, proposed (with his characteristic bluntness) that she become his mistress. Without even waiting for her answer, he gave her the key to the secret studio that he used as a love nest and told her to meet him at three o’clock the next afternoon. Early the next morning, Leonora went to visit the place alone. She found it tasteless: It looked exactly like a motel room. Taking advantage of the fact that she was in her menstrual period, she covered her hands with blood and used them to make bloody handprints all over the walls in order to provide a bit of decoration for that anonymous, impersonal room. Buñuel never spoke to her again.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky: The Creator of El Topo

“When you find love, real love, it’s like a catastrophe, like a tsunami. Like an earthquake, because all your individuality, all what you believed you are, it’s breaking. And you are completely another person. You never know what you were. And it’s a catastrophe –– but a good catastrophe, not a bad catastrophe.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“Cuando te acaricié me dí cuenta que había vivido toda mi vida con las manos vacías.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“One does not go to the theater to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery that we all are.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

“If you want to draw some advantage from your history, you must accept not only this miracle but also many others. In memory, everything can become miraculous. All you have to do is wish it, and freezing winter turns into spring, miserable rooms fill up with golden tapestries, murderers turn good, and children who cry out of loneliness receive caring teachers who are really the children themselves moved back from adulthood to their early years. Yes, my daughter, the past is not fixed and unalterable. With faith and will we can change it, not erasing its darkness but adding lights to it to make it more and more beautiful, the way a diamond is cut.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky, Where the Bird Sings Best

“One becomes wise only in measures, as he goes through his own insanity.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

“The worst grotesque situations: believing one knows oneself, believing one knows everything about some topic, believing one has judged with absolute impartiality, believing one will love and be loved forever. In conversation, people think one thing and, in trying to communicate it, say something else. The interlocutor hears one thing, but understands something different. When answering, one does not respond to what the other person initially thought, nor to what the other person said, but to what one has understood. The final result: a conversation between deaf people who do not even know how to listen to themselves.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography

“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. ”
― Alexandro Jodorowsky

“No sé adonde voy, pero sé con quién voy.
No sé dónde estoy, pero sé que estoy en mi.
No sé qué es Dios, pero Dios sabe lo que soy.
No sé lo que es el mundo, pero sé que es mio.
No sé lo que valgo, pero sé no compararme.
No sé lo que es el amor, pero sé que gozo tu existencia.
No puedo evitar los golpes, pero sé como resistirlos.
No puedo negar la violencia, pero puedo negar la crueldad.
No puedo cambiar al mundo, pero puedo cambiarme a mi mismo.
No sé lo que hago, pero sé que lo que hago me hace.
No sé quién soy, pero sé que soy el que no sabe.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky, La danza de la realidad

“You are engaging in madness. I feel obliged to accompany you.”
― Jodorowsky, Alejandro

“God does not exist, God is not good. All that awaits us is the cat who will urinate on our grave.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky, Where the Bird Sings Best

“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

“If you are great, El Topo is a great picture. If you are limited, El Topo is limited.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“This is true freedom: to be capable of leaving ourselves, crossing the boundaries of our little world to open up the universe.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky, Psicomagia

“You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“El topo es un animal que cava galerías bajo la tierra buscando el sol y a veces su camino lo lleva a la superficie: cuando ve el sol, queda ciego.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“He who understands philosophy understands laughter. That mysterious Word at the beginning, mentioned in the Bible, is a divine guffaw.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky, Where the Bird Sings Best

“Sometimes in those moments of greatest abandonment when we feel utterly deserted a sign appears where we least expect it and shows us the way. Those who dare to advance into darkness, expecting nothing, will at last find their shining goal. On a page torn from a book, which an autumn wind blew around my feet, I read the words that showed me I was on the right path: “The initiate who sets out in good faith to find the Truth, only to find, on all sides, the inexorable barrier that throws him back into the ‘ordinary tumult,’ will hear the Master say: ‘Watch out, there is a wall.’ ‘But is this wall temporary?’ asks the restless soul, ‘can I pass through it or demolish it? Is it an adversary? Is it a friend?’ ‘I cannot tell you. You must discover it for yourself.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography

“I had to first overcome the nightmares: my dreams were populated by menaces, shadows, murderous persecutions, disgusting events and objects, ambiguous sexual relations that excited me while also making me feel guilty. Here, I was a character inferior to my level of consciousness in the real world, capable of misdeeds that I would never have allowed myself to perpetrate while awake. I repeated many times, like a litany, “It is I who dream, just as it is I who am awake, and not a perverse and vulnerable child. The dreams happen in me; they are part of me. All that appears is myself. These monsters are aspects of me that have not been resolved. They are not my enemies. The subconscious is my ally. I must confront the terrible images and transform them.” I often had the same nightmare: I was in a desert, and a psychic entity determined to destroy me would come from the horizon as a huge cloud of negativity. I would wake up screaming and soaked in sweat. Now, tired of this undignified flight, I decided to offer myself in sacrifice. At the climax of the dream, in a state of lucid terror, I said, “Enough, I will stop wanting to wake up! Abomination, destroy me!” The entity approached threateningly. I stood still, calm. Then, the immense threat dissolved. I woke up for a few seconds, then peacefully went back to sleep. I realized it was I myself who had fed my terrors. I now knew that what terrifies us loses all its power in the moment that we stop fighting it. I began a long period during which whenever I had dreams, instead of running I would face my enemies and ask them what they wanted to tell me. Gradually, the images transformed before me and began to offer me presents: sometimes a ring, other times a golden sphere or a pair of keys. I now understood that just as every devil is a fallen angel, every angel is also a demon that has risen.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography

“Es dificil que alguien te rompe el corazon.
Generalmente eres tu mientras tratas de meterlo a la fuerza en donde sabes bien que no cabe”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky