Alejandro Jodorowsky Quotes

We only have problems we really want to have.

Many people effectively stop carrying out what it's called "life's a movie." The majority of people want to be like others, and this drives them to a death in life. It is necessary to find what distinguishes us from others in order to be something. To the extent that we try to be like others, we convert ourselves into zombies.

If we want to transform reality, we begin with ourselves. We do not ask the world to change, and we do not fight against society. It has to be us ourselves who affirm our own values.

To transform oneself one must give, but to transform oneself one must also learn. One closes oneself off and does not admit love from another, the tenderness or the help of another. The real leap is learning to receive, which is as difficult as learning to give. And it is necessary to learn to ask for what one needs: justice is to give to oneself what one deserves. This is why the gospels say, "Knock and the door will be opened." If I ask for a long life, it is because I have the right to ask for it. If I ask that we will use an energy other than oil, it is because I have the right to ask for it. We have to learn to ask for what is just and to not ask for what it is not necessary to ask.

We have to be very conscious of the fact that beneath every illness is a prohibition. A prohibition that comes from a superstition.

We have to stop thinking that God is going to fix everything and saying that if God made everything bad in this universe then we are here to do to, too, again. If there is a God, we are here to help him. This requires that we take possession of the world and of ourselves. We must do what we want to do with full consciousness and with full responsibility. In this level of divine consciousness, we find true art.

I say: "What you give, you give to yourself; what you do not give, you give up." And this is to say that whatever you do in the world, you do to yourself; and whatever you do not give to the world, you lose. If I keep my knowledge, I lose it. (...) One receives knowledge and gives it. When you give knowledge, you enrich yourself. If you do not give love, you are detracting from yourself. If I begin to help people, if I begin to heal people, I begin to heal. Do you understand? To be a therapist, you have to be a patient. The first thing to do to heal yourself is to heal others. I have one more saying: "I do not want anything for myself that I do not want for others".

I remember some artists who said this world isn't worth anything, that it is a pigsty, that we are going nowhere, that God is dead, and all those things. Bad literature is this. To expose your navel, to tell how you drank your morning coffee amid general disgust, with everything around you rotting. While the world is dying, I drink my coffee. Or I perform my little sex acts. This is old-fashioned. One must cross this neurotic curtain.

No one fulfills himself fully. What is fulfilling oneself? Advancing as one can.

Beauty is the maximum limit we can access through language. We cannot reach the truth, but we can get close to it through beauty.

That is the marvel of true art, that no one has yet found a way to commercialize it.

At that time they said I was crazy because I wanted to make a movie that was 14 or 16 hours. But now people do it. There are three—"Hobbit 1," "Hobbit 2," "Hobbit 3." Everything I wanted to do is possible to do today.

Tenemos que ser muy conscientes de que debajo de cada enfermedad hay una prohibición. Una prohibición que viene de una superstición.

When we do something we have never done, we are already on the road to healing. We must break the routines.

We need to work in a job that we like and always be peaceful people, to do what we like. We must be what we are and not what they want us to be. To love what we love without obligation, without neurotic knots that we cannot untie. To desire what we want and to create what we are capable of making. To live with a certain prosperity, without wasting. But a prosperity for everyone, not a prosperity based on exploiting others. And, of course, it is necessary to become immortals and for this we have to live as if we were immortals thinking that we have a thousand years more to do what we want but without forgetting that in ten seconds we can die.