Top 80 Jeanne Moreau Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “My aim in life is not to judge.”

— Jeanne Moreau

2. “As long as you don’t make waves, ripples, life seems easy. But that’s condemning yourself to impotence and death before you are dead.”

— Jeanne Moreau

3. “One thing you have to give up is attaching importance to what people see in you.”

— Jeanne Moreau

4. “People’s opinions don’t interfere with me.”

— Jeanne Moreau

5. “Death is an absolute mystery. We are all vulnerable to it, it’s what makes life interesting and suspenseful.”

— Jeanne Moreau

6. “Life is given to you like a flat piece of land and everything has to be done. I hope that when I’m finished, my piece of land will be a beautiful garden.”

— Jeanne Moreau

7. “The cliche is that life is a mountain. You go up, reach the top and then go down.”

— Jeanne Moreau

8. “I can’t belong to groups. I’ve tried. I behave normally, but people don’t look at me normally.”

— Jeanne Moreau

9. “Age does not protect you from love. But love to some extent, protects you from age.”

— Jeanne Moreau

10. “To give the best of yourself, to be ready to please is OK for a while. But people expect certain things from you, and you have to go beyond that and say, no.”

— Jeanne Moreau

11. “When you live under the power of terror and segregation, you can’t ever start a work of art.”

— Jeanne Moreau

12. “My analyst refused to hear my dreams. This was years ago.”

— Jeanne Moreau

13. “For me it’s not possible to forget, and I don’t understand people who, when the love is ended, can bury the other person in hatred or oblivion. For me, a man I have loved becomes a kind of brother.”

— Jeanne Moreau

14. “It’s a fantastic thing to take the risk of getting so close to your desire, expressing your obsession so absolutely.”

— Jeanne Moreau

15. “I have no doubt who I am.”

— Jeanne Moreau

16. “Nostalgia is when you want things to stay the same. I know so many people staying in the same place.”

— Jeanne Moreau

17. “In making dinner for a friend, don’t forget the love.”

— Jeanne Moreau

18. “All those vitamins aren’t to keep death at bay, they’re to keep deterioration at bay.”

— Jeanne Moreau

19. “It’s just as idiotic to say there is no life after death as it is to say there is one.”

— Jeanne Moreau

20. “You don’t have to be a wreck. You don’t have to be sick. One’s aim in life should be to die in good health. Just like a candle that burns out.”

— Jeanne Moreau

21. “Every night I go over what I did in the day, in ethical or moral terms. Have I treated people properly? Did I tell the truth?”

— Jeanne Moreau

22. “The life you had is nothing. It is the life you have that is important.”

— Jeanne Moreau

23. “I don’t like going where I’ve already been. Life is a myriad of territories to discover. I don’t want to waste time with what I already know.”

— Jeanne Moreau

24. “Why should we stop living because some people try to kill what is left of energy in ourselves?”

— Jeanne Moreau

25. “What is amazing for a woman of my age is that I change as the world is changing-and changing very, very fast. I don’t think my mother had that opportunity to change.”

— Jeanne Moreau

26. “Acting for me was the gospel, the love of the spoken word.”

— Jeanne Moreau

27. “You should not separate your life from what you do.”

— Jeanne Moreau

28. “If you’re extremely, painfully frightened of age, it shows.”

— Jeanne Moreau

29. “To go out with the setting sun on an empty beach is to truly embrace your solitude.”

— Jeanne Moreau

30. “Aging gracefully is supposed to mean trying not to hide time passing and just looking a wreck. Don’t worry girls, look like a wreck, that’s the way it goes.”

— Jeanne Moreau

31. “It’s like climbing a staircase. I’m on the top of the staircase, I look behind me and I see the steps. That’s where I was.”

— Jeanne Moreau

32. “Sometimes there is a great intimacy between women without any homosexuality. This is something that men are less likely to understand, because for them sensuality means sexual. It doesn’t excite us to imagine two men together.”

— Jeanne Moreau

33. “I think more and more people want to live alone. You can be a couple without being in each other’s pockets. I don’t see why you have to share the same bathroom.”

— Jeanne Moreau

34. “To give and receive love, you have to be in touch with pain, you have to be capable of provoking it and feeling it.”

— Jeanne Moreau

35. “If you want to live your life through to the end, you have to live dangerously.”

— Jeanne Moreau

36. “Life is an accomplishment and each moment has a meaning and you must use it.”

— Jeanne Moreau

37. “Many people associate stage fright with a fear of looking ridiculous, making a bad impression. For me, it’s like a kind of fever.”

— Jeanne Moreau

38. “I don’t feel guilt. Whatever I wish to do, I do.”

— Jeanne Moreau

39. “I have always had the urge to open forbidden doors: with a curiosity and an obstinacy that verge on masochism.”

— Jeanne Moreau

40. “When Tony was madly in love with me, his relationship with Vanessa Redgrave was ending.”

— Jeanne Moreau

41. “Women will not talk about football unless one of them is in love with a football player, and then suddenly you discover that they know everything that is to be known about it.”

— Jeanne Moreau

42. “To me age is a number, just a number. Who cares?”

— Jeanne Moreau

43. “To give a character life in a short space of time, it helps if you arrive on screen with a past.”

— Jeanne Moreau

44. “I’ve been related to everything. Even the production; I knew how much it cost, I knew where the money went. It didn’t last long, because hierarchy came back again.”

— Jeanne Moreau

45. “I work more now because at this time of my life I am not disturbed from my aim by outside pressures such as family, passionate relationships, dealing with ‘who am I?’ – those complications when one is searching for one’s self.”

— Jeanne Moreau

46. “Although for some people cinema means something superficial and glamorous, it is something else. I think it is the mirror of the world.”

— Jeanne Moreau

47. “Knowing how to die is knowing how to live. What is death anyway? It’s the outcome of life.”

— Jeanne Moreau

48. “Some people are addicts. If they don’t act, they don’t exist.”

— Jeanne Moreau

49. “When I’m acting, I’m two beings. There’s the one monitoring the distance between myself and the camera, making sure I hit my marks, and there is the one driven by this inner fire, this delicious fear.”

— Jeanne Moreau

50. “It’s dangerous to assert oneself.”

— Jeanne Moreau