Top 35 Jonas Mekas Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.”

— Jonas Mekas

Featured in: Poetry Quotes

2. “For an artist, to be normal is a disaster.”

— Jonas Mekas

Featured in: Poetry Quotes, Art Quotes

3. “We need less perfect but more free films.”

— Jonas Mekas

4. “In a meadow full of flowers, you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry, of life.”

— Jonas Mekas

5. “My films are the celebration of reality, of life, of my friends, of actual daily life that passes and is gone tomorrow. We don’t pay attention to it when it happens.”

— Jonas Mekas

6. “I’m not so much in the future as always in the present. The future always takes care of itself. What I do now with my video camera, it can only record what is happening now. I am celebrating reality and the essence of the moment. And that’s the greatest challenge that I have.”

— Jonas Mekas

7. “I missed my teenage years. I was never a teenager.”

— Jonas Mekas

8. “Seek the insignificant small but essential qualities, essential to life.”

— Jonas Mekas

9. “An adventurer can always return home; an exile cannot. So I decided that my home would be culture.”

— Jonas Mekas

10. “For me, to catch, to celebrate the reality and life and friends and everything around me the very moment it happens – that’s what is, that’s what I’m possessed by.”

— Jonas Mekas

11. “My life is essentially not so unique. On some deeper levels we feel the same, we know the same things. Therefore if I show my life 365 days, moments from those days, it will reflect and it will have connection with lives of all of us.”

— Jonas Mekas

12. “I’m not an abstract artist; I leave that to others. To me, abstract art ended with Kazimir Malevich’s ‘Black Square.’ To continue it is senseless.”

— Jonas Mekas

13. “In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don’t care about my cinema. In Europe they don’t know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!”

— Jonas Mekas

14. “Place means nothing to me. I can be at home anywhere.”

— Jonas Mekas

15. “I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.”

— Jonas Mekas

16. “The nature of the video camera really makes you focus on the present. Since I have always been a diarist filmmaker, not one who stages scenes with actors, it has always been about the present moment.”

— Jonas Mekas

17. “I make home movies-therefore I live. I live-therefore I make home movies.”

— Jonas Mekas

18. “You have the possibility to give light a dimension in time.”

— Jonas Mekas

19. “A meeting with nature means to me sometimes more than meeting with a person. It wakes up feelings, memories. Its arrows shoot deep, always on target.”

— Jonas Mekas

20. “We try to hide it every way we can, but it always comes out, the lyricism. A Lithuanian connot live without nature. You can’t detach him from the wide, green fields, from the brooks, the snow, the cobwebs flying through the air in late September, or from his forests, fragrant with moss and beries.”

— Jonas Mekas

21. “There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.”

— Jonas Mekas

22. “It’s more difficult for a mother to forget one child than for living humanity to forget all the millions who died in this war.”

— Jonas Mekas

23. “As a film-maker and a poet, I feel it’s my duty to be an eye and an antenna to what’s happening around me. I always felt a solidarity with those who are desperate and confused and misused and are seeking a way out of it.”

— Jonas Mekas

24. “Most of my videos consist of fragments, one or two minutes long. They are haikus or sketches. I have thousands.”

— Jonas Mekas

25. “Education is the resistance to everything that is bad today.”

— Jonas Mekas

26. “Just as in writing, there are novelistic and sort of pedestrian ways of telling a story, to write a postcard with your little pocket camera and put it on websites. I think that’s where the most exciting kind of imagery and content is being recorded and exchanged today.”

— Jonas Mekas

27. “I brought Yoko Ono to New York and gave her her first job there. I was editing a magazine called ‘Film Culture.’”

— Jonas Mekas

28. “All nature is full of hatred for humans. I don’t think man has any friends among plants or animals. I suspect that even dogs and cats, those so-called best friends of man, are only pretending friendship to man in order to spy on his misdeeds, and they would betray him without blinking an eye the first chance they had. They know that Man is the worst of the beasts.”

— Jonas Mekas

29. “I had the fortune to spend some time, mostly during the summers, with Jackie Kennedy’s and her sister Lee Radziwill’s families and children. Cinema was an integral, inseparable, as a matter of fact, a key part of our friendship.”

— Jonas Mekas

30. “Some cameras are heavier and need to be on tripods. Others are small enough to hide in your pocket. There are places where you don’t want to feel like you are disturbing anything, so I may use a camera like that.”

— Jonas Mekas

31. “People were rushing by, all hurrying to die.”

— Jonas Mekas

32. “You want me to be rational. The most rational thing is the machine. Go to the machines. All their separate parts work together. But I live with no purpose, irrationally.”

— Jonas Mekas

33. “We have learned to eat like snakes. When there is something to eat – we eat enough to last for a week. When there is nothing – we don’t eat. Now, when we get our food supply, we eat it all, right there, we leave nothing for tomorrow. Like the birds. And then we read our books. We go after spiritual food...”

— Jonas Mekas

34. “I’m working in a form of cinema that can be described, and has been described, as a diaristic form of cinema. In other words, with material from my own life. I walk through life with my camera, and occasionally I film. I never think about scripts, never think about films, making films.”

— Jonas Mekas

35. “Yes, I got my first Bolex camera a few weeks after being dropped in New York by the United Nations Refugee Organization. That was on October 29th, 1949. With my brother Adolfas, we wanted to make a film about displaced persons, how one feels being uprooted from one’s home.”

— Jonas Mekas

36. “The deeper I went into culture, the more confused I got. So I needed something more real. I said, “Okay, from now on, my country will be cinema.””

— Jonas Mekas

37. “I am very active on the Internet. In 2007, I made one film every day and posted it on my website. That was a 365-day project, really exhausting, but I still put a lot of stuff on – from life, friends, my own life.”

— Jonas Mekas

38. “How to live? To fall, to fall, with eyes closed, to fall into every occasion, into everything.”

— Jonas Mekas