Top 70 Jean-Luc Godard Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Photography is truth.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

Featured in: Truth Quotes, Photography Quotes

2. “He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

3. “Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

4. “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

5. “The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

6. “Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

7. “Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

8. “Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

9. “Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

10. “To be or not to be. That’s not really a question.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

11. “Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

12. “A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

13. “I don’t know if I am free because I am happy or happy because I am free.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

14. “People like to say, ‘What do you mean exactly?’ I would answer, ‘I mean, but not exactly.’”

— Jean-Luc Godard

15. “The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

16. “Suddenly, I don’t know what to say. It happens often to me. I know what I want to say, I think about whether it is what I mean, but when the moment comes to speak, I can’t say it. – Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

17. “There is no point in having sharp images when you’ve fuzzy ideas.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

18. “To be immortal and then die.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

19. “Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

20. “Europe has memories, America has t-shirts.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

21. “I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

22. “There is no such thing as intellectual property.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

23. “My aesthetic is that of the sniper on the roof.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

24. “To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body – both go together, they can’t be separated.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

25. “If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

26. “Objects exist and if one pays more attention to them than to people, it is precisely because they exist more than the people. Dead objects are still alive. Living people are often already dead.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

27. “I don’t think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can’t kiss a movie.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

28. “One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

29. “This is not a just image, this is just an image.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

30. “The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

31. “If direction is a look, montage is a heartbeat. To foresee is the characteristic of both; but what one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in time.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

32. “First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we’re entering the Age of the Ass.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

33. “Killing a man in defense of an idea is not defending an idea; it is killing a man.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

34. “Once we know the number one, we believe that we know the number two, because one plus one equals two. We forget that first we must know the meaning of plus.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

35. “Why all these signs around us that make me doubt language and submerge me in meanings, drowning reality instead of extracting it from the imaginary?”

— Jean-Luc Godard

36. “The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?”

— Jean-Luc Godard

37. “Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

38. “You don’t make a movie, the movie makes you.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

39. “The world isn’t a sad place, it’s just big.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

40. “I had the feeling that Sarajevo was the perfect place to shoot the film I wanted to shoot. It is the perfect illustration of purgatory.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

41. “Movies are a world of Fragments.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

42. “Reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

43. “We once believed we were auteurs but we weren’t. We had no idea, really. Film is over. It’s sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

44. “People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

45. “A critic is a soldier that fires on his own men.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

46. “To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

47. “I always feel that a man and a woman, who do not like the same films, will eventually divorce.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

48. “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

49. “When you go to the cinema you look up, when you watch television you look down.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

50. “Don’t ever promise to adore me forever. Let’s keep the feeling that this love of ours is a love without tomorow.”

— Jean-Luc Godard