Top 70 Alejandro Jodorowsky Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

Featured in: Freedom Quotes

2. “Have a dream. Fight to do a dream. Don’t ask if it is possible to do something or if not possible. Try to do it!”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

3. “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

4. “If you are great, ‘El Topo’ is a great picture. If you are limited, ‘El Topo’ is limited.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

5. “Words don’t heal. Art heals!”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

6. “I am not a normal person. I am living in a normal body, but my mind is not normal.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

7. “Every mind has another vision of reality. There is not a common reality. Every person thinks he is like the others, but every person is different, living in his own psychology.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

8. “We all exist in our own personal reality of craziness.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

9. “You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

10. “Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

11. “Failure doesn’t mean anything, it just means changing paths.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

12. “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

13. “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

14. “Art gives to you a new conception of reality, opens your mind, opens your heart, opens your desire of action.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

15. “If art is not a medicine for the society, it is a poison.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

16. “Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

17. “I was raping Frank Herbert but with love.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

18. “When the bull’s-eye becomes as big in your mind as an elephant, you are sure to hit it.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

19. “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

20. “For art to be art it has to cure.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

21. “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

22. “People say I am mad. I am not mad. I am trying to heal my soul.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

23. “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

24. “Five cats and a woman. That is all I need in life.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

25. “I realized once again that what I believed myself to be was an arbitrary deformation, a rational mask floating in the infinite unexplored internal shadows. Later, I understood that diseases do not actually sicken us; they sicken what we believe ourselves to be. Health is achieved by overcoming prohibitions, quitting paths that are not right for us, ceasing to pursue imposed ideals, and becoming ourselves: the impersonal consciousness that does not define itself.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

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

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

27. “I am not a commercial industry creator. I don’t believe in making art to make money.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

28. “When you put a great amount of energy and hope in a big project, you can be destroyed if you don’t do it. But myself, I say: “To fail is only to see the way to fail.””

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

29. “Every one of us is a perfect human being, deformed by the family, the society and the culture.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

30. “I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “Humanity are not individuals; we are collective. And if we have difference, we have wars all the time. We have crisis. We need to open our mind. This is the only solution we have.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

35. “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

36. “Do not become attached to anything that can destroy you in the course of time.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

37. “I don’t live in France; I live in myself.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

38. “Si la vida te dio un don, tienes que devolverle a la vida un 10%.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

39. “My father was a monster. A monster! I cut with my family when I was 23 and I never see them again.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

40. “One becomes wise only in measures, as he goes through his own insanity.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

41. “Movies have heart. Have mind. Have power. Have ambition.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

42. “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

43. “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 testicle red, and I write.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

44. “You are engaging in madness. I feel obliged to accompany you.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

45. “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

46. “One does not go to the theater to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery that we all are.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

47. “My wife is 37 years younger than me. I don’t feel the difference.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

48. “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

49. “I want to show the world that it is possible. It’s possible to remember your self. To open your mind. To open your heart. To open your creativity. To live with less, but to live well.”

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

50. “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