text:
We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.
We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
Wars based on principle are far more destructive… the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.
The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money… they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it – aliens.
The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.
The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.
The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.
So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.
Saints need sinners.
Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.
Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it.
No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.
In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.
If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
I owe my solitude to other people.
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.
Faith is a state of openness or trust.
But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
But to me nothing – the negative, the empty – is exceedingly powerful.
But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.
Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.
And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.
A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
Your political views really denote your spiritual views.
You live, you learn.
Women are so powerful they're scary, and the incentive to squash this has been going on for so long that some of us actually believe we're subordinate.
With songwriting I spend a lot of time living life, accruing all these experiences, journaling, and then by the time I get to the studio I'm teeming with the drive to write.
When someone says that I'm angry it's actually a compliment. I have not always been direct with my anger in my relationships, which is part of why I'd write about it in my songs because I had such fear around expressing anger as a woman.
When people ask me who I'd want to have dinner with, dead or alive, I always say, 'John Lennon.' I just feel that he was an artist who was, in his own way, committed to wholeness and authenticity in a not dissimilar way that I am years later.
When I'm off the road, my husband and I recharge our batteries. It's a day of deep rest and connection with the spiritual, and that can be anything – going for a walk in nature, being in silence, burning incense.
When I was younger, I was terrified to express anger because it would often kick-start a horrible reaction in the men in my life. So I bit my tongue. I was left to painstakingly deal with the aftermath of my avoidance later in life, in therapy or through the lyrics of my songs.
When I was producing on my own, I was doing it in order to – in a very patriarchal entertainment industry, let alone planet – very much hell-bent on trying to prove to myself, if nothing else, that I could do it as a woman.
When I start writing songs and it turns into an overly belabored intellectual process, I just throw it out.
What's that line from TS Eliot? To arrive at the place where you started, but to know it for the first time. I'm able to write about a breakup from a different place. Same brokenness. Same rock-bottom. But a little more informed, now I'm older. Thank God for growing up.
What influenced me was Tori Amos, who was unapologetic about expressing anger through music, and Sinead O'Connor. Those two in particular were really moving for me, and very inspiring, before I wrote 'Jagged Little Pill.'
What I try to keep in mind is that there are going to be a lot of articles that are going to be misrepresentative of what I'm about as a person and as a writer.
Well, as a kid I did not get Shakespeare. I just never understood it.
We're taught to be ashamed of confusion, anger, fear and sadness, and to me they're of equal value to happiness, excitement and inspiration.
We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect.
We live, in North America in general, if I'm given the indulgence of selling us down the river, in a culture of fear of this connective sense of spirit.
Variety is important when it comes to exercise. I don't do anything that bores me to tears.
Unless I really loved it and felt really passionate about it, I would just kind of abort the song and start a new one.
Typically, I would run away from conflict and write about it – that was easier than staying and dealing face-to-face with humans; that's terrifying for me.
Typically I go in the studio and whatever I'm contemplating that day will wind up being a song. I don't come in with lyrics… I just go in and let it happen.
Trauma happens in relationships, so it can only be healed in relationships. Art can't provide healing. It can be cathartic and therapeutic but a relationship is a three-part journey.
To me the biggest irony of this lifetime that I'm living is that for someone who thrives in the public eye in the creative ways that I do, I actually don't enjoy being in the public eye.
They're different kinds of challenges depending upon what phase of life I'm in.
There's cleanliness to how I eat now. I'm much more in tune with my body, so now that I'm so in tune based on having become a semivegan, I can tell what foods affect energy levels. I can tell when I've been eating particularly high nutrient foods or I can tell when my glycemic levels are all over the place.
There's a continuity between what I care about in any form: I care about it in my music, in article-writing, in how I dress, in how I live, in my relationships, in how I navigate paparazzi, how I decorate my home. There's such a continuity between everything that I don't really care what form it shows up in.
There were websites erected to figure out how to kill Alanis. I just do not need to see this; it's not good for anybody.
There were a lot of people who were a little afraid of the rage or blaming stance I was taking, and find what I am doing now more refreshing.
There was a period of time during the 'Jagged Little Pill' era where I don't think I laughed for about two years. It was a survival mode, you know. It was an intense, constant, chronic over-stimulation and invasion of energetic and physical literal space.
Then I realized that secrecy is actually to the detriment of my own peace of mind and self, and that I could still sustain my belief in privacy and be authentic and transparent at the same time. It was a pretty revelatory moment, and there's been a liberating force that's come from it.
The whole celebrity thing is not something I'm overly interested in. I don't pop up at parties. It's just not my thing.
The thing you can't underestimate is the true fan's intimacy. So Lady Gaga or anybody's true fan, I don't think they're going anywhere. There are people who are into commitment. If they're connecting with an artist, I think they'll be there over the long course.
The thing I always default to is that I'll always be here to write songs.
The spirituality that I experience sometimes touches on religion, in that I resonate with the thread of continuity that permeates through all religions. But in terms of it being a concretized, organized part of my life, it's not.
The person who knows HOW will always have a job. The person who knows WHY will always be his boss.
The people that were invested in me staying the same way after a decade will most likely by default have to be disappointed.
The more vulnerable and the more confused the song is, the equal and opposite effect is how I feel after having written it.
The fear of this delicate and fierce feminine has more to do with our fear of being vulnerable again, getting hurt again, than it does by our actual distaste for the beauty of the feminine and Her qualities.
The ego is a fascinating monster.
Peace of mind for five minutes, that's what I crave.
Partnership is the way. Dictatorial win-lose is so old-school.
Part of being famous is offering up this blank screen upon which people can project everything, and it's a sacred act, putting yourself out there, in a way that lots of celebrities aren't steeled for; they're not prepared for the degree to which people define them.
Over the last couple of years, I've really worked toward balancing my life out more, having a little bit more time with friends, family and my boyfriend. There was a period of time when they were way down the list. It was all about music and touring and if everything fell by the wayside, so be it.
Only traumatised people want to be famous.
My three addictions of choice are food, love and work.
My son was five months old, and I built a makeshift studio in my living room so that I could do the attachment parenting approach and write the record at the same time. That was fortuitous, that we could build that in the house.
My parents offered me the idea of ceilinglessness. There was no limit in terms of what was possible; no messages sent to me to say that I couldn't do anything.
My own approach has always been to push intense emotions down and attempt to deal with them later. When I was younger, I was terrified to express anger because it would often kick-start a horrible reaction in the men in my life.
My own approach has always been to push intense emotions down and attempt to deal with them later.
My message to anyone who's afraid that they can't write music when they're happy is 'Just trust the passion.' The passion can write a lot of things.
My main objective with every album is to capture a moment in time, which usually makes the whole process very relaxing. I only discover in retrospect when looking back at the songs how my life is going!
My greatest environments in which I can grow, or grow up, is in personal romantic relationships with a man.
My greatest achievement is being able to write records that are real snapshots of what's going on in my life. I won't repeat myself for the sake of commerce, or to please other people.
My favourite pastime used to be sitting on a park bench watching people. But after 'Jagged Little Pill,' the eyeballs turned, and I was the watched one.
My brother says that I was writing songs about fate while he was off playing soccer. Now I tell him he's 33 and being a professional while I'm playing soccer with my friends. Ha!
Music will always be a part of my life. I love music and I don't care how many units I sell.
Making a movie requires 20 to 500 people to make and a lot of money and the stakes are a lot higher.
Long hair is a security blanket for me. I cut it short a few years ago and I really never want to do that again. When I do cut it, I cut it myself.
Knowing that people make my songs their own is what keeps me going.
It's when someone has an agenda of their own for the record that it doesn't work for me.
It's not just the 'Grammys' that I've pulled out of. I also pulled out of the English awards as well. The reason that I wanted to pull out was because I believe very much that the music industry as a whole is mainly concerned with material success.
It's a joke to think that anyone is one thing. We're all such complex creatures. But if I'm going to be a poster child for anything, anger's a gorgeous emotion. It gets a bad rap, but it can make great changes happen.
Infidelity is a deal breaker for me. I've broken up with people over it. You can't do monogamy 90 percent of the time.
In the past, I had workaholic issues.
In the face of patriarchy, it is a brave act indeed for both men and women to embrace, rather than shame or attempt to eradicate, the feminine.
In my opinion, I think sarcasm and humor in a song, without turning it into a novelty song, is really charming.
In LA, where I live, it's all about perfectionism. Beauty is now defined by your bones sticking out of your decolletage. For that to be the standard is really perilous for women.
In 1995, I was thrust into the role of reluctant, flag-waving feminist and emotionally-focused artist/advocate.
If I could sell 500 million records every time, it would be great. But I've also had the luxury experience of having it when I was a teenager, in a very kind of model version of it.
I've just always felt it's an incredibly empowering thing, particularly for young women, to capitalize on their coordination and their strength. It's a very empowering thing to feel strong in your body.
I've been surrounded by a lot of people who felt that external success would result in them feeling good about themselves. But it just seems extremely unfulfilling to me.
I've been really enjoying writing articles and writing music and music for movies.
I've been doing a lot of different cross-training and kickboxing and Capoeira and kite surfing, and I've just really been back to what I consider my original athletic self.
I've always been really opinionated, and mixed with being really open hearted, open to people shifting what I think all the time, but I like to speak with conviction.
I'm really clear about what my life mission is now. There's no more depression or lethargy, and I feel like I've returned to the athlete I once was. I'm integrating all the parts of me – jock, musician, writer, poet, philosopher – and becoming stronger as a result.
I'm quite obsessed with the idea of nailing the girl friendship. It's such an art, so delicate.
I'm excited about there being more of a sisterhood these days. Back in the '90s there was a lot of hate – the women I looked up to as artists were dissing me! It's not so patriarchal these days – there's more love and a lot less hate!
I'm doing it because I choose it. And if it's not working, I can make a change.
I'm clearly most well known for my music. Eventually, ultimately, I'll be writing books. I'm still writing articles now. I just consider myself a writer.
I'm about 90 percent vegan. I think veganism is really well suited for training, at least for me anyway.
I'm a liability to them – I'm a woman, I'm empowered, I'm an artist. I've had executives who can't come to my shows they're so scared of me. I've been a thorn in many people's sides just by existing.
I'll keep evolving and put that into my songs.
I'll be writing songs till I die. There's just no question.
I'll be writing records until I'm dead, whether people like it or not! I can't not write; if I don't, then I get really depressed. I'll keep going, I promise!
I'll be writing records until I'm dead, whether people like it or not!
I'd rather talk to people about their personal spiritual practices or what they believe love is. I'm born to do that. Could I enter into the political realm and dive into that? Sure, but I don't think I would want to do that.
I wish people could achieve what they think would bring them happiness in order for them to realize that that's not really what happiness is.
I was taught from a young age that I had to serve, so that turned into me thinking I had to save the planet.
I was so ready to become a mom. Actually, I was ready secondarily to become a mom. I was so ready to have the intimacy and commitment of marriage.
I was motivated by just thinking that if you had all this external success that everyone would love you and everything would be peaceful and wonderful.
I was left to painstakingly deal with the aftermath of my avoidance later in life, in therapy or through the lyrics of my songs.
I was born in '74, so I missed out on all the great early '60s and early '70s.
I was always such a people-watcher. I would sit on street corners alone and watch people and make up stories about them in my head. Then, all of a sudden, I was the one being watched.
I was 9 when I wrote 'Fate Stay with Me.' It was this fictional song about romance gone wrong.
I want to walk through life instead of being dragged through it.
I want to poke holes in the erroneous beliefs about what fame provides. It won't raise your self-esteem, it won't create profound connection, it's not going to heal your childhood traumas, it's only going to amplify them. You're going to be subject to a lot of criticism and praise, both of which are violent in their own ways.
I try to keep a low profile in general. Not with my art, but just as a person.
I thought the more famous I became, the more friendships I would have, but the opposite was true.
I think there is no better way to invite a human being to view their body differently than by inviting them to be an athlete, by revering one's body as an instrument rather than just an ornament.
I think some people think I'm a smarty-pants. Some people think I'm intense, some people think I'm super-esoteric and nuts.
I think some fans want everything to stay they same because they want to stay the same.
I think quite spiritually of myself. I feel like I'm here to support the human evolution.
I think it's irresponsible when celebrities imply they're doing it all themselves. My son has aunties and uncles around all the time, and my husband is my hero. He's really full-on. I couldn't do it any other way.
I think it's child abuse to have someone in the public eye too young. Society basically values wealth and fame and power at the cost of well-being. In the case of a child, it's at the cost of someone's natural development. It's already hard enough to develop.
I think fame became exciting for me in the late '90s because I could actually use it as a means to an end. I could actually have it help me serve my vocationfulness.
I think a common misperception about attuning and tending to a child's needs so constantly is that they don't grow in their independence, but I think that the opposite is true.
I think a beautiful quality that's a biological, hormonal imperative for women, whether they have children or not, is that we're built to be empathic. For me, it was finally being maternal in an appropriate way instead of trying to mommy ex-boyfriends.
I still indulge in a glass of wine or chocolate – treats are mandatory. Without deviating from the day-to-day healthy diet once in a while, it wouldn't be sustainable for me, and that's what I wanted: an approach to eating to last my entire life.
I started playing piano when I was 6. And I knew that wanted to be involved in that form of expression, whether it was through music, or acting, or dancing, or painting, or writing.
I see the whole concept of Generation X implies that everyone has lost hope.
I see my body as an instrument, rather than an ornament.
I saw music as a way to entertain people and take them away from their daily lives and put smiles on their faces, as opposed to what I see it being now, which is a way for me to actually communicate, and a way for me to tap into my subconscious.
I remember thinking during those times that I wanted to write in a way where there are no rules.
I really do see that anywhere I am, whether it's doing interviews a hundred in a row, that every situation I'm in, I'm at choice in the matter.
I need to be performing. I need to be acting. I need to be designing a condo and ripping down walls and buying new plates and looking at fashion magazines. There always has to be some movement in the artistic department for me to not get really, really low.
I make up new lyrics to well-known lullabies. Mostly because I don't actually know a lot of the lyrics.
I love to get to the underbelly of why people are up in arms about anything. Really, what I see is a big shadow in the West, in America especially, and everyone's afraid of looking stupid. But the truth is, I'm a genius and I'm stupid at the same time.
I love songs that are very autobiographical.
I live with some of my best friends from high school, very commune-like, in my house. It's my hippie way of life.
I like to make pasta with puttanesca sauce and arugula salad.
I know that I'm deeply, spiritually, profoundly philosophical and I also know that I'm about the flakiest person you're gonna meet.
I just feel compelled to continue to be transparent. It just really levels the playing field and eradicates the shame that I have, or that one might have, about being human. So I'm going to just keep going.
I highly recommend getting older! There's less tendency to people-please.
I have not an ounce of regret. Every link is so valuable in forming the chain that is my life. Who I am today is because of those links, and I wouldn't change any of them.
I have a profound empathy for people who are in the public eye, whether they manifest it themselves or whether it happened by accident – it doesn't matter to me. I think there's a great misunderstanding of what it is to be famous.
I happen to be lucky in that I knew what I wanted to do as far as a career since I was nine years old.
I guess what people forget sometimes is that when I write songs, I write them sometimes in about 20 minutes.
I grew up in a very masculine environment. So I was around a lot of men, my brothers and their friends. There was just a lot of guys around.
I get angry at myself for staying in relationships way too long.
I found that the more truthful and vulnerable I was, the more empowering it was for me.
I find as an artist if I'm not expressed relatively consistently, I get really depressed.
I felt like I was making a record under the radar, and that is my favorite way to do anything.
I don't want to offend people and I don't want to be mean, but social commentary and comedy for me are part and parcel. I think the greatest social activists are comedians.
I didn't want to be one of those women who wake up at 63 years old and realize they've missed the window of opportunity for marriage and children.
I didn't have high self-esteem when I was a teen-ager, as I think most teen-agers don't.
I did commit to myself that I would not jump back into being the workaholic that I can be before I gave myself an honest opportunity to create the marriage of my dreams and to create the beginning of the family of my dreams, and that took a hot second.
I couldn't be touring unless my husband was on the road with me, taking care of our son while I'm onstage and doing interviews.
I could write six songs in one day with everything that's going on.
I could get away with not taking care of myself as a bachelorette but as a mom I can't.
I can't not write, if I don't then I get really depressed.
I am a firm believer that one way to become enlightened is to be so relaxed, as relaxed as you possibly can be.
Getting married and starting a family has been a lifelong goal and one that I have persevered through different paths up to it!
For me, a life without expectation results in a life with inspiration.
For four to six months at a time, I would barely eat. I lived on a diet of Melba toast, carrots, and black coffee.
Fame is hollow. It amplifies what is there. If there is any self-doubt, or hatred, or lack of ability to connect with people, fame will magnify it.
Europe seems a little softer, but in America it's harsh. In L.A., where I live, it's all about perfectionism.
Down the road, I'll probably have a kid or two or three. And there will probably be political events or spiritual things to comment on, and humor.
Do I appreciate the idea of jealousy, revenge and all these so-called dark qualities? Yes. Do I write these songs in order to engage in some public war with someone? No.
Courage and willingness to just go for it, whether it is a conversation or a spontaneous trip or trying new things that are scary – it is a really attractive quality.
Canada has a passive-aggressive culture, with a lot of sarcasm and righteousness. That went with my weird messianic complex. The ego is a fascinating monster. I was taught from a young age that I had to serve, so that turned into me thinking I had to save the planet.
But once I acclimated and really used fame for what it was offering me as a tool to serve my life purpose of inspiring and contributing, then it started to get fun again.
But I love to entertain. My vocation is to accrue all these experiences, to write about them, to get them out of my system, to not get sick, and then to share them publicly.
Breakups are a horrible thing for almost everybody I know. For someone who is a love addict, it's debilitating.
Beauty is now defined by your bones sticking out of your decolletage. For that to be the standard is really perilous for women.
At some point, I would like to write a book and other things, but I work best when there is some sort of deadline in my own mind, but not when fifty people or fifty million people are breathing down the back of my neck.
At one point, I was just perceived as only being angry, but now I'm being perceived as angry, peaceful, and spiritual.
As long as I can say what it is that I need to say, then I'll fit whatever I'm trying to say around a melody.
As a teen, I was both anorexic and bulimic.
As a kid, I was listening to Aretha Franklin, Etta James and hip-hop as well as music my parents were listening to, like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen.
Anything I do has to be directly related to my music. If it isn't, I don't really see a point to it.
Anger has been a really big deal for women: how can we express it without feeling that, as the physically weaker sex, we won't get killed. The alpha-woman was burned at the stake and had her head chopped off in days of old.
And ultimately the people who produce my records, they know that they're here to serve the purpose of me expressing who I am at this period of time and augmenting that or pulling it forward and I love that process.
And if I had a preference, it would be to be able to not be in the studio until 4 in the morning.
And I always laugh at that, because I think I've always been doing what I want to do since Day 1.
America's a very traumatized society.
Alpha men are very turned on by the alpha woman, really high chemistry, really fun to work with, probably really fun to have affairs with, but there's not sustainable harmony in that lack of complement. There can only be one person in the driver's seat.
Ageism works in both directions. As a teenager in the public eye, people would talk condescendingly to me. When you get older there's this feeling that you have to start carving up your face and body. Right now I'm in the middle ground – I think women in their thirties are taken seriously.
A lot of preconceived notions that I had about fame and status and money and joy and pain, and all of these things that I thought I knew, I didn't.
A good man often appears gauche simply because he does not take advantage of the myriad mean little chances of making himself look stylish. Preferring truth to form, he is not constantly at work upon the facade of his appearance.
Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.
You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.
Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.
What the world requires of the Christians is that they should continue to be Christians.
What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.
We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives… inside ourselves.
We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.
We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.
We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
We call first truths those we discover after all the others.
We are all special cases.
We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.
Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.
Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.
To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.
To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?
To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.
To be happy we must not be too concerned with others.
To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.
To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.
Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.
There is no love of life without despair of life.
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
The society based on production is only productive, not creative.
The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.
The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.
The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.
The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.
The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.
Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.
Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.
Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.
Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.
One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.
No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.
Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.
Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.
Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.
Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.
Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood – never.
Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.
Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.
It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.
It is necessary to fall in love… if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.
It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
Integrity has no need of rules.
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death… these are things that unite us all.
In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself – limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.
In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is.
I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.
I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
I know of only one duty, and that is to love.
I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.
I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.
I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.
I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.
How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!
How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.
He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship – never.
Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.
Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.
Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.
Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.
Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.
Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and that is its whole secret.
Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.
Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.
Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
Don't wait for the last judgment – it takes place every day.
Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.
Charm is a way of getting the answer 'Yes' without asking a clear question.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures – be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.
As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.
All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.
Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.
After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.
You largely constructed your depression. It wasn't given to you. Therefore, you can deconstruct it.
We teach people that they upset themselves. We can't change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today.
There's no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.
There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
The art of love is largely the art of persistence.
Self-esteem is the greatest sickness known to man or woman because it's conditional.
Rational beliefs bring us closer to getting good results in the real world.
People have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware.
People got insights into what was bothering them, but they hardly did a damn thing to change.
People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness.
People could rationally decide that prolonged relationships take up too much time and effort and that they'd much rather do other kinds of things. But most people are afraid of rejection.
Most people would have given up when faced with all the criticism I've received over the years.
Many psychoanalysts refused to let me speak at their meetings. They were exceptionally vigorous because I had previously been an analyst and they were very angry at my flying the coop.
Let's suppose somebody abused you sexually. You still had a choice, though not a good one, about what to tell yourself about the abuse.
In the old days we used to get more referrals, because people had insurance that paid for therapy. Now they belong to HMOs, and we can only be affiliated with a few HMOs.
If something is irrational, that means it won't work. It's usually unrealistic.
If I had been a member of the academic establishment, I could have done other experiments.
I'm very happy. I like my work and the various aspects of it – going around the world, teaching the gospel according to St. Albert.
I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren't listening to my objections. So I finally quit after practicing it for six years.
I thought foolishly that Freudian psychoanalysis was deeper and more intensive than other, more directive forms of therapy, so I was trained in it and practiced it.
I think the future of psychotherapy and psychology is in the school system. We need to teach every child how to rarely seriously disturb himself or herself and how to overcome disturbance when it occurs.
I think it's unfair, but they have the right as fallible, screwed-up humans to be unfair; that's the human condition.
I started to call myself a rational therapist in 1955; later I used the term rational emotive. Now I call myself a rational emotive behavior therapist.
I hope to die in the saddle seat.
I had used eclectic therapy and behavior therapy on myself at the age of 19 to get over my fear of public speaking and of approaching young women in public.
I had a great many sex and love cases where people were absolutely devastated when somebody with whom they were compulsively in love didn't love them back. They were killing themselves with anxiety and depression.
I get people to truly accept themselves unconditionally, whether or not their therapist or anyone loves them.
Freud had a gene for inefficiency, and I think I have a gene for efficiency.
For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency.
By not caring too much about what people think, I'm able to think for myself and propagate ideas which are very often unpopular. And I succeed.
As a result of my philosophy, I wasn't even upset about Hitler. I was willing to go to war to knock him off, but I didn't hate him. I hated what he was doing.
Acceptance is not love. You love a person because he or she has lovable traits, but you accept everybody just because they're alive and human.
Will is the dynamic soul-force.
What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.
We have all the light we need, we just need to put it in practice.
War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory.
To work with the hands or brain, according to our requirements and our capacities, to do that which lies before us to do, is more honorable than rank and title.
The universal medicine for the Soul is the Supreme Reason and Absolute Justice; for the mind, mathematical and practical Truth; for the body, the Quintessence, a combination of light and gold.
The sovereignty of one's self over one's self is called Liberty.
The eyes of the cheerful and of the melancholy man are fixed upon the same creation; but very different are the aspects which it bears to them.
Philosophy is a kind of journey, ever learning yet never arriving at the ideal perfection of truth.
One man is equivalent to all Creation. One man is a World in miniature.
Faith begins where Reason sinks exhausted.
Doubt, the essential preliminary of all improvement and discovery, must accompany the stages of man's onward progress. The faculty of doubting and questioning, without which those of comparison and judgment would be useless, is itself a divine prerogative of the reason.
Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius.
Above all things let us never forget that mankind constitutes one great brotherhood; all born to encounter suffering and sorrow, and therefore bound to sympathize with each other.
A war for a great principle ennobles a nation.
A man should live with his superiors as he does with his fire: not too near, lest he burn; nor too far off, lest he freeze.
Whoever is spared personal pain must feel himself called to help in diminishing the pain of others. We must all carry our share of the misery which lies upon the world.
Wherever a man turns he can find someone who needs him.
We cannot possibly let ourselves get frozen into regarding everyone we do not know as an absolute stranger.
We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.
Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.
Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now – always.
Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.
There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.
The willow which bends to the tempest, often escapes better than the oak which resists it; and so in great calamities, it sometimes happens that light and frivolous spirits recover their elasticity and presence of mind sooner than those of a loftier character.
The true worth of a man is not to be found in man himself, but in the colours and textures that come alive in others.
The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.
The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.
The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.
The highest proof of the spirit is love. Love the eternal thing which can already on earth possess as it really is.
The great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.
The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.
The African is my brother but he is my younger brother by several centuries.
Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.
Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light.
Serious illness doesn't bother me for long because I am too inhospitable a host.
Seek always to do some good, somewhere. Every man has to seek in his own way to realize his true worth. You must give some time to your fellow man. For remember, you don't live in a world all your own. Your brothers are here too.
Reverence for life is the highest court of appeal.
Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.
One who gains strength by overcoming obstacles possesses the only strength which can overcome adversity.
One truth stands firm. All that happens in world history rests on something spiritual. If the spiritual is strong, it creates world history. If it is weak, it suffers world history.
One thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.
Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.
My life is my argument.
Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will – his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals.
Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.
Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.
Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.
Life becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also becomes richer and happier.
Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life it is bad to damage and destroy life.
Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.
In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.
Impart as much as you can of your spiritual being to those who are on the road with you, and accept as something precious what comes back to you from them.
If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.
I wanted to be a doctor that I might be able to work without having to talk because for years I had been giving myself out in words.
I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.
I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.
I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.
Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.
Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.
Example is leadership.
Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.
Ethics is the activity of man directed to secure the inner perfection of his own personality.
Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.
Do something wonderful, people may imitate it.
Do something for somebody everyday for which you do not get paid.
Do not let Sunday be taken from you. If your soul has no Sunday, it becomes an orphan.
Day by day we should weigh what we have granted to the spirit of the world against what we have denied to the spirit of Jesus, in thought and especially in deed.
Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.
Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.
By respect for life we become religious in a way that is elementary, profound and alive.
By having a reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world By practicing reverence for life we become good, deep, and alive.
At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.
As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.
Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly, even if they roll a few stones upon it.
An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight… the truly wise person is colorblind.
A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.
A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.
A man does not have to be an angel in order to be saint.
A man can do only what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day.
A great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.
Without energy life would be extinguished instantaneously, and the cellular fabric would collapse.
Whatever man does he must do first in his mind.
Water is life's matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.
This oxidation of hydrogen in stages seems to be one of the basic principles of biological oxidation.
This celebration here tells me that this work is not hopeless. I thank you for this teaching with all my heart and lift my glass to human solidarity, to the ultimate victory of knowledge, peace, good-will and understanding.
The source of this energy is the sun's radiation.
The real scientist is ready to bear privation and, if need be, starvation rather than let anyone dictate to him which direction his work must take.
The foodstuff, carbohydrate, is essentially a packet of hydrogen, a hydrogen supplier, a hydrogen donor, and the main event during its combustion is the splitting off of hydrogen.
So I set out to study the oxidation system in the potato, which, if damaged, causes the plant to turn brown. I did this in the hope of discovering, through these studies, the key to the understanding of adrenal function.
Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.
Research is four things: brains with which to think, eyes with which to see, machines with which to measure and, fourth, money.
Investigations during the last few decades have brought hydrogen instead of carbon, and instead of CO2 water, the mother of all life, into the foreground.
I am the son of a small and far-away nation and the other laureates have all come from different countries from all over the world and we all were equally received here with signs of sympathy.
Here we stand in the middle of this new world with our primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life, with terrific forces at our disposal, which we are clever enough to release, but whose consequences we cannot comprehend.
Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought.
A vitamin is a substance that makes you ill if you don't eat it.
A living cell requires energy not only for all its functions, but also for the maintenance of its structure.
A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.
We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
Recreational development is a job not of building roads into the lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.
Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.
In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.
Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.
Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.
Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.
What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes – ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving – by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.
There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
The proper study of mankind is books.
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love – almost as violent and much more mischievous.
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'
If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
Every man's memory is his private literature.
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
Dream in a pragmatic way.
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
Chastity – the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.
To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all.
The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one's neighbor and this fact goes far to account for religious intolerance. It is evidently consoling to reflect that the people next door are headed for hell.
The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.
The people who have really made history are the martyrs.
The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.
The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.
The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach.
Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.
Part of the public horror of sexual irregularity so-called is due to the fact that everyone knows himself essentially guilty.
Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life.
Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.
Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.
Intolerance is evidence of impotence.
Indubitably, magic is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgment and practice than in any other branch of physics.
In the absence of willpower the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.
If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad.
I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.
I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.
I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.
I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck.
I can imagine myself on my death-bed, spent utterly with lust to touch the next world, like a boy asking for his first kiss from a woman.
Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Chinese civilisation is so systematic that wild animals have been abolished on principle.
You have to make millions on Friday night, because there are another 600 films waiting behind you, with explosions and everything.
You have kids studying master class visual arts who are pushed to make films that will be successful economically; that's what they focus on. So they work for corporate interest instead of artistic expression.
You can better embrace life, you can enjoy it more, when you are conscious that it will end. You bite life.
Yes, I am a Mexican, and I have a past and a culture. But what matters is the film itself, not where it was financed or cast.
Writing is not an unknown territory for me.
Who cares about my opinions?
While 'Babel' is a foreign-language film in some countries, in others, it is a local film.
When you taste a mango in the United States, it's just tasteless.
When you shoot in a room, that's a symmetrical thing that contains you. When there's no contention, the sensation is overwhelming you. That's a challenge, to do that.
When you see things upside down, the ego can be extraordinarily funny; it's absurd. But it's tragic at the same time.
When you live in a city, as I do, where violence is really in the streets, and people die every day, there's nothing funny about it.
When you have something that is bothering you, and then you articulate, take the time to really express it and see it clearly, to recognize. To acknowledge that is already a liberating energy.
When you have critics filing on Twitter, it leaves no time for thought and perspective.
When you have a fresh point of view that comes from the right side of the heart, it's just so valuable. You can take it or not take it, but just that perspective can give you a lot of strength or make you reflect on a lot of things.
When you do a film in a foreign language, you know there's a cost in it, that you know, unfortunately, the audiences of foreign language films have not been cultivated. There's a market, but the market has been reduced, unfortunately, and you know that when you're making a foreign language film, you're making a choice.
When you are shooting in a conventional way, you put nets around yourself. It's very hard to fall and hit the ground. You can always manipulate things to make it not embarrassing. If the scene is a little bit bad, you can polish it or even take it out. You can hide your mistakes.
When we are looking for validation, that will never satisfy us. When we are looking for affection, for love, a little bit of that will be enough to be complete.
When things cost so much, you appreciate it much more.
When there's a good script, everybody circles.
When I'm working, I'm insufferable because I get stuck with myself, and suddenly I become obsessive, thinking about how to make something better.
When I went to university, I finally got exposed to European films, and they had a strong impact on me. I felt those films had a lot of things to say that weren't getting expressed in the films I was used to seeing.
When I was sixteen, I was an absolutely romantic guy. I fell in love every week. I mean, I was in love with everybody, but unfortunately, nobody was in love with me.
When I was about to turn 50, I went into a kind of personal revision and observed my own priorities and what led those priorities in my life. And many things that, in a way, were profound.
When I think about growing up, I feel most affected by two travels that I made working in cargo boats when I was 16 and 18. One of them crossed through the Mississippi and Baton Rouge and Mobile, Alabama, and another went all the way to Europe.
When I talk about sad things, I talk about sad things.
When I have been exposed to so many films that are so bad, my soul gets crushed. I just feel intoxicated.
What good is making a jewel if nobody see it? But cost depends on the story. To get those performances in 'Biutiful,' you need that time. You need 60 takes in a scene and a year to edit. It's not realistic to do it any other way.
We want to conquer the world and have 1,000 likes, 1 million likes, but at the same time, we are depressed. We are lonely, but we have 10,000 followers. We are all bipolar.
We try to show that violence has a consequence – when you create violence, it turns against you.
We have these ambitions that are very hard to accomplish because life puts us in our place. We have this battle with mediocrity.
We have lost the taste for the real.
We have always existed in different forms – carbon, oxygen, water, heat. Maybe Heaven is this brief period when the elements realize they're alive.
We are the only alive creatures that are mortals; the animals are immortal, which is why they live stupidly. We are the only creatures that know that we will die, but that is a gift. It's important because we know we have to take advantage and squeeze life and understand why we're here in the first place.
Very little is known about Hugh Glass as a real guy that existed 200 years ago, except that he was attacked by a bear, betrayed and left for dead, and has to survive in the winter. I said, 'What really drives a human to survive those conditions?'
Ultimately, with every film I'd done before, there was a reference. They have their own uniqueness, but there was always a precedent.
Two words guided the making of 'Babel' for me: 'dignity' and 'compassion.' These things are normally forgotten in the making of a lot of films. Normally there is not dignity because the poor and dispossessed in a place like Morocco are portrayed as mere victims, or the Japanese are portrayed as cartoon figures with no humanity.
Trump doesn't know it yet, but he will become one of the guys that he hates very soon. Soon he will be a loser.
Too much knowledge and analysis can be paralysis.
To think that we can understand everything is such stupidity because our senses are so limited. We are so limited that to feel that we can understand the creation scientifically is a little bit naive. It's very childish.
To shoot a conventional film means that you are always covering yourself. You are putting nets and, in a way, letting bad decisions take over.
To question your own process is a necessity. If you don't question yourself, it's impossible to improve.
To make a film is easy; to make a good film is war. To make a very good film is a miracle.
To direct actors is difficult. To direct actors in another language is more difficult, but directing non-actors in another language is one of the craziest things that I have done and one of the most rewarding experiences I have had.
To become a celebrity, a name – and I've actually met some that speak of themselves in the third person – it's scary. They become an object, not a human, complex, questioning thing where the cells are always changing.
Time starts out as a notion. But after you turn fifty, time is not a notion anymore but a fact that you start feeling clearly, and in a way, it pushes you to become present in the present.
Time is what allows stories to spread into people's consciousness.
There was so much fear after 9/11, and that fear caused people to make the wrong decisions.
The way films establish the order of scenes is very artificial.
The way I put together images is a reactive art.
The way America sees Mexico, if they have any sense of it, is like Taco Bell. Our countries are neighbors, and the only hard food to get in America is true Mexican. It's impossible to find, even in L.A. Why is that?
The visual architecture of 'Biutiful' is the most sophisticated of all the films I have directed.
The problem with the screenplay is that it's not literature, and it's not a film. It's a very weird, technical kind of blueprint that will be absolutely transformed into something else that is not that, you know? Honestly, a screenplay is no literature.
The expected vertical line of Ikiru's narrative breaks when Kurosawa does a flash-forward in the middle of the film.
The emotions of the actors are better when they understand the chronological factors that are adding to the story.
The demographic complexity of this country should be reflected not only at the end of the chain, but since the beginning, in order that more of these people can be excited and integrated.
The creative process is mysterious; a conversation, a ride in the car, or a melody can trigger something.
The corporation and the hedge funds have a hold on Hollywood, and they all want to make money on anything that signifies cinema.
The cavemen, when they saw the antelopes, they had to scratch them on to the caves because they needed to express the immediacy of what they were being affected by – and I love that. That is why I do what I do. I need to express myself.
That incredible bubble and high expectations built at festivals can work against a film.
Sometimes reading scripts is terrible.
Sad music, I always thought, is more beautiful than other music. But at the same time, I am in my personal life a very happy guy. I have a sense of humor. I am not the kind of depressed guy all the time brooding. No. I am very enthusiastic about things.
Rhythm is God. I think, without rhythm, you can't create – there is no art.
Really, Mexico City has always been this big, complex monster of a city that has always had real problems and needs, and I've always found my way through it in different ways.
People talk about the pain of defeat, but I think defeat has a lot of value. I think the wound of victory can be even more damaging than defeat. Very few people really know how to win.
On a transcendental level, a film is not going to be better or worse because there's a prize behind it. The work will be what it is, with or without a prize.
Nowadays, a critic has to watch 700, 800 films a year, and I know through experience, being a juror in prestigious film festivals where supposedly the best films are arriving, from twenty films maybe you see two that are good, one that is so-so, and one that is extraordinary. And the other sixteen are terrible.
Now that we're poisoned with the culture of superheroes, I think it's important to laugh about it.
Now is a time where there are so many social networks, such need for validation… you don't have to be a star or a politician to want to have likes or dislikes. Now there is a disease of popularity in the whole society.
My responsibility is to make a film and find my dramatic language; I don't have any political or social responsibility.
My mom had very low expectations for me, and she really had a point. I was a big problem at seventeen. If I had a kid like me, I would have those same expectations.
My kid will come home from seeing the latest 'Transformers' movie, and I'll ask him, 'How was it?' 'Amazing!' 'What was it about?' 'I don't know, but it was amazing!'
My father had a difficult relationship with success, maybe because he never obtained it. But he was very wise about it because he observed how you can become rotten fruit once you get power.
My duty is to make probable the improbable. If I tell you how I did it, I will ruin your experience.
My cinema is an extension of myself. A sort of life-testimony of my vital experience, with my few virtues and my numerous limitations.
Movies started out as an extension of a magic trick, so making a spectacle is part of the game.
Movies become art after editing. Instead of just reproducing reality, they juxtapose images of it. That implies expression; that's art.
Millions of Mexicans leave their kids in order to take care of other kids. That's a very painful thing.
Many Mexican directors are scared to shoot in Mexico City, which is why there are many stories in Mexican cinema about little rural towns, or set a hundred years ago.
Look, I'm no purist – there are good superhero films, and there are bad ones.
Life and death are illusions. We are in a constant state of transformation.
It's very healthy to be aware of your ego.
It's not anthrax or terrorism or AIDS that is the worst ill in our world: The most horrible disease in the world is hate.
It's more enjoyable for me to know that life is finite. Knowing that, I would like to go to a party. When you get to the holidays, if you think that the holidays will be forever, you just take it for granted. But, if you know that you have just three days at the beach, you will be so happy to be there every day.
It's harder to make real audio than special effects audio.
It's hard for me to work for somebody else. I can work with someone, but not for someone.
It's famous that comedians have a very dark personal state of mind. I think, in my case, it's the same. The only way to get deep is to have a balance, or a counterbalance.
It's different if you're self-fed by a culture such as the U.S. where it's so rich, you don't have to look outside. Everything's already there. But when you grow up in the desert, you have to be looking all over for inspiration.
It was liberating to do comedy. It felt like playing in a jazz band.
Irony is a great tool to deal with things. It's an intellectualization, a way to go above things, which can work.
Irony became the head that bit its tail and then there is no way out.
Innocence can be more powerful than experience.
In my work I think what drives me is perfection. I'm a chronically unsatisfied guy.
In hotels, every time I make a reservation and they never find my name, they never can pronounce it; it's so long, and sometimes they confuse.
In families you can find the source of every human drama. It is interesting because the cell of a society, the cell of a country, the cell of humanity – everything lies in the family.
In a world where irony reigns, where you have to separate, protect and laugh at anything that is honest or has an emotional charge, I bet for catharsis. I like to invest emotionally in things. And catharsis, when it touches the emotional vein, can open the doors of even those who protect themselves.
In 'A Confession,' Tolstoy found meaning that he could hold on to, and he lived for another 30 years.
If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy. That's the comedy that I like.
If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.
If the audience, in minute 50, is thinking about the way a movie is shot, there's a problem. I want it to permeate emotionally.
If art doesn't move people, then art has failed.
If I had been at an assembly line for films, I don't know if I would be the best driver. I think I would have crashed the car.
I've never done a period piece or a comedy, and that could be something truly different for me.
I've listened to music all my life. I've always felt that music tells more stories sometimes than films, with more possibilities. Every time you listen to them, songs bring different images and moods – depending on where you are in your life, you can listen to a song, and it means something different.
I've learned to lose with a smile on my face. That's what the Oscar teaches you.
I'm very curious, I guess, as a human being.
I'm usually very critical of myself.
I'm telling the same story in every film.
I'm scared of horses, and I don't know how to shoot them, but that's what excites me. After 40 years old, if you don't do some things that really terrify you, I don't think they're worth doing.
I'm overwhelmed by the pain in the world; I'm affected by the news very much, and adding that to my work was becoming a little bit too much.
I'm neurotic. I complain all the time. I'm a workaholic. And I'm never satisfied.
I'm less interested in reality. I'm more interested in perception, the truth of the universe that we see.
I'm an intense person. My own vision of life has always been heavy.
I'm an intense person.
I'm always surprised when some director says, 'When I saw this film, that changed my life.' I don't have that.
I want the camerawork to fit the narrative and tell the story from the point of view of the character, but sometimes, to be interacting with the sensations of the story, you almost become like a ghost, you know? Like, someone that is floating, observing, not really judging what's going on.
I understand Sean Penn. He has every right to look for El Chapo.
I think, unfortunately, everything is becoming about comfort, you know? A comfortable way to tell a story. The comfortable way, so that the audience will never be lost. A comfortable way to produce a film with green screens or without a lot of physical effort or losing control because of the weather or physical locations.
I think when you turn 50 you get a little melancholic in a way.
I think we do good things and bad things, sometimes simultaneously – or they may be the same thing.
I think we are defined as human beings through our families, no matter what kind of family – through our relationships with parents, brothers and sisters.
I think we are all connected in this world.
I think there's nothing wrong with being fixated on superheroes when you are 7 years old, but I think there's a disease in not growing up.
I think the most experimental way to a film is to tell the story the traditional way, because everyone is doing the other thing.
I think that when we wrestle with death… we start fearing life, because then we come to terms with something that is inevitable.
I think that the best things come from thought, without thinking. I think that's the smartest use of the intelligence that we all have.
I think that people would like to, at all times, reject death and disease with technology.
I think that my films are basically family stories, beyond the fact that they are global and have political and social commentary.
I think that in order to be a film director, one has to be a warrior who shouldn't be defeated by the daily onslaught of problems.
I think musically.
I think intelligence basically can be in a way defined by the possibility of having two opposite ideas living together and at the same time functioning. That's why I think a smart script has two things living in the same place, and they're absolutely contradictory.
I think films are bigger than structure.
I think bad movies are made around the world, not just in Hollywood. There are as many bad art films in the whole world as there are bad commercial films.
I think Kurosawa was one of the first storytelling geniuses who began to change the narrative structure of films.
I think Jenny Beavan is a masterful costume designer and very deserving of the Oscar for 'Mad Max: Fury Road.'
I think I want to talk about life from the point of view of death.
I studied for three years in the theater, and it was a very, very scary experience to direct live, being so vulnerable without the possibility to control things, to be so exposed.
I started off writing TV adverts. I saw those as rehearsals for a feature film.
I started developing 'The Revenant' before 'Birdman.'
I see only one requirement you have to have to be a director or any kind of artist: rhythm. Rhythm, for me, is everything. Without rhythm, there's no music. Without rhythm, there's no cinema. Without rhythm, there's no architecture.
I respect every religion.
I really try, at least consciously, not to be cynical or ironic.
I really didn't want to become branded as 'that multistructural guy.'
I realized – and I am probably the last person in the world to realize this – that we live our lives with no editing.
I personally think that you have to get lost to find something really worthwhile, at least sometimes.
I never deny a true experience in one shot.
I love the three-act theory. It works and works beautifully. But you don't necessarily have to structure a story that way: Cortazar and Borges wrote in different structural styles.
I love Sam Mendes, but I went to see 'Spectre' with my kid, and the opening scene of the Dia de Muertos party, with this kind of tropical music, in downtown Mexico City, with all these people dancing like it's the Rio de Janeiro carnival… I had to laugh.
I love Eric Clapton.
I like to make films, but the only reason I do is because I'm a very bad musician.
I like the possibility of failure. I don't want to be in a comfortable zone.
I like so many different directors: Scorsese, Coppola, Cassavetes, Jarmusch, Gus van Sant, Woody Allen and the greats like Fellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky and among current filmmakers von Trier, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-wai.
I leave the story room to grow into what the movie is driving me to do.
I learned with 'Birdman' that it's liberating when you just lose yourself and go after something that terrifies you. The experience was so good.
I learned with 'Birdman' that it's liberating when you just lose yourself and go after something that terrifies you.
I learned there are ways to approach life. You can never change the events, but you can change the way you approach them.
I know how to work with people. I've worked with the same people for 10 years. I'm not that kind of auteur. I hear ideas.
I have to have the wheel. It's given me an opportunity to experience and explore things.
I have never met a superhero, but why are we so obsessed with superheroes?
I have never directed anything for the stage. I studied for three years in the theater, and it was a very, very scary experience to direct live, being so vulnerable without the possibility to control things, to be so exposed.
I have learned that I am a one-woman man.
I have fantastic ideas.
I have dark skin. My nickname is El Negro. They call me El Negro in Mexico because even in my country, the dark skin is evidence of Indian blood, a sign that one technically belongs to a third class. Even my grandmother had some kind of differentiation with me, because I was darker than my siblings.
I have been very lucky to have final cut in all my films; everything that is wrong in them is my fault.
I have always said that innocence is much more powerful than experience.
I have always considered myself to be spiritual in a way that has less to do with religion and more with an awareness that you have, and the consciousness you have of being alive and the consciousness that you will be dead.
I have always been very wary of what would happen when I die. I feel I would die every day, and that thought sometimes made me more aware that I am alive.
I have a notebook, and I know what decisions will be made in pre-production. Everything is pre-determined in the pre-production period. I visually design the whole thing, and I know when things will happen.
I have a lot of what you might call creative self-loathing – I have pretty high expectations, and they seem to consistently be higher than what I'm able to accomplish.
I have a bad reputation, I guess.
I have ADD. I can't pay attention to one thing too long.
I don't like the ironic tone that our pop culture, in the world, has taken. Everything is 'ironic.' Everything is 'cool.'
I don't know if I have a career or not, or where it ends or it begins. I have been working, doing what I do for a long time. But my creative process has always been so tortuous.
I don't have a career. I have a life.
I do think that the emotional weight of 'Biutiful' has blinded some viewers to the beauty and complexity of the film.
I didn't have a normal academic career. I never studied cinema. I learned from life.
I define myself from a vision, from a point of view of life.
I can't understand the conditions of a corporate product being designed and getting millions. I admire it, it's great, but I don't know how to do that. I have to have the wheel.
I can't understand the conditions of a corporate product being designed and getting millions. I admire it, it's great, but I don't know how to do that.
I can't imagine David Lean justifying why he went to the desert to shoot 'Lawrence of Arabia.'
I can be unbearable sometimes asking for so many takes.
I began to learn about the camera and the actors. That gave me a lot of the skills. At the same time, advertising gives you a lot of vices, for example, an obsession for a superficial look, but at the same time, it gives you the capacity to synthesize the story – tell a story in one minute.
I am not a depressive person at all.
I am not a depressive person at all, but I reflect a lot on my life, and life in general, from the perspective of death.
I always have considered Michael Keaton to be a phenomenal actor because he navigates drama and comedy.
Good directors don't answer questions with their work. They generate debate and create discussion.
From the time we open our eyes, we live in a Steadicam form, and the only editing is when we talk about our lives or remember things.
Freedom comes with a lot of responsibility. When you are by yourself, you have to develop a third eye.
For the actors, the talent is to serve the demands that I ask of them, to do it with naturality and truth, and to be honest when we were terrified.
For me, the most important thing that I have to accomplish is to be a good father. That's the most difficult challenge of my life. That's the most important thing for me, more than films.
For me, it is especially important to maintain my interior life. My spirituality, my connectedness. That is the way I think. That is the way I deal with life and tough moments. I keep in touch with something bigger than me. And I connect with people who have an interior life – a connection with something bigger than them.
Films like 'Babel' can transcend the one point-of-view formula that has reigned for so long.
Filmmaking can give you everything, but at the same time, it can take everything from you.
Fear of the unknown is a great creative partner.
Everything is reason. If you don't have reason, you have nothing.
Everyone's terrified of being mediocre. Everyone wants to be special.
Everybody is looking for validation, no matter who you are, and I think that's a need of the human condition – to look for affection or recognition or validation.
Do you know the phrase, 'The word 'water' will not wet you?' It's one thing to write down an idea and another thing entirely to execute it.
Directing non-actors is difficult. Directing actors in a foreign language is even more difficult. Directing non-actors in a language that you yourself don't understand is the craziest thing you can possibly think of.
Cinema is universal, beyond flags and borders and passports.
Cinema is an infinite medium, so we should take advantage of it, I think.
Cinema is a mirror by which we often see ourselves.
Cannes or any other major festival is basically an animal in its own nature, creating very specific perceptions of films in a moment.
At a very young age, I was influenced enormously by Julio Cortazar or Carlos Fuentes. In that literature, there's always an exploration of different perspectives, points of view.
As the camera, I try to subordinate every word to be truthful and honest to each character's context.
As a city, it is always compelling. But every day in Mexico City, I give thanks that I am alive.
As a Third World citizen, I always feel that I need to express my point of view. Sometimes the points of view of Third World countries are never expressed. We don't have that possibility, sometimes, to spread what we feel and how we see things.
Antonio Sanchez is from Mexico City. I met him at a Pat Metheny concert. He did a solo, and I thought, 'This is an octopus man!'
Americans easily forget that the air they breathe is the same as those in Europe or Africa or Asia; it's the same air as Jesus breathed. I would like them to remember that connection.
Always when you are doing films, the themes swallow you in one way or another.
All of us want something in life, all of us have flaws, and all of us have strengths. So, I always try to discover those things in a character and then try to expose it in one way or another.
All my films I have shot in chronological order – always. And the reason is that there's a moment that the screenplay is the notion of the film. But when you start doing a film… the work itself starts being transformed, and you have to surrender.
Actors are exposed in a way that nobody else can understand. They are subject to the likes and dislikes of people their entire life, no matter how successful they are. At the same time, in order to be liked, you have to not be yourself. So it's a very complicated human exercise – an alchemy that I have never understood.
3D is the way we experience life.
'Russian Ark,' I adore – I almost cried at the end of that film, it's so beautiful.
'Ikiru' is existential but with a lot of tenderness.
'Biutiful' is not about death. It's about life. It's a hymn to life.
'Biutiful' is a tough film. It doesn't make concessions to the vulgarity of light entertainment. It's not the kind of film that you see every day in the Cineplex. But as an artist, it's the thing that I needed to do.
'Birdman' came from a very beautiful side of me, from a part of honesty and surrender about things.
'Babel' is about the point of view of others. It literally includes points of views as experienced from the other side. It is not about a hero. It is not about only one country. It is a prism that allows us to see the same reality from different angles.
'Amores Perros' is three stories that interconnect in one moment, which is the car accident.
'Amores Perros' is rock, '21 Grams' is jazz, 'Babel' is an opera, and 'Biutiful' is a requiem.
'21 Grams' is only one story told by three different points of view, but they are really physically connected – literally, with the heart.
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.
You dream every night. Every person in the world, even if they don't remember, is dreaming every night.
When you put a great amount of energy and hope in a big project, you can be destroyed if you don't do it.
When my father died, I did not cry. When my cat died three days later, I cried a lot.
When I'm tired, I see industrial pictures. But I'll see one every two months. If I see one every day, I'll become an idiot.
When I'm not creating something, I get bored; I despair.
When I was an adolescent, I abandoned my country at 23 years to come to Paris to know Andre Breton, the 'Pope of Surrealism.' And for three years, I was there working with him being a surrealist.
When I was a young person I went to the university and I learned a rational language, to think with the left side of the brain. But in the right side of the brain you have intuition and imagination. Words are not the truth; they indicate the way to go, but you need to go alone, in silence. Symbols have a language that kills the words.
When I started to pay income tax, I was 50 years old.
When I brought 'El Topo' to New York, no one understood the picture. But John Lennon understood. John and Yoko Ono, they presented 'El Topo' in the United States; they introduced it.
What's important is to give your ideas to the world if you love the world.
We only have problems we really want to have.
We have to be very conscious of the fact that beneath every illness is a prohibition. A prohibition that comes from a superstition.
We are all working for the immortality of the human consciousness.
We all exist in our own personal reality of craziness.
Today a picture has value if it makes a lot of money. Myself, I declare I want to make a picture to lose money. Really! I want to lose money.
To have hands, to have fingers, is weird. Real life is weird, to have fingers?
To be an artist, you need to play inside your work.
The worse the newspapers speak of the world, the better I feel.
The world is not violent. But there is a lot of violence in it.
The tarot is sacred.
The planet is ill, everyone knows that. But I need to be optimistic, otherwise I would just be adding to the negativity. So every night I come on Madrid TV and read a piece of good news.
The first thing I didn't understand was my life. It's a mystery. And today I don't understand economy or politics. I don't know why politics or economy are destroying the world, but I will understand after understanding.
The end of the surrealism movement was so political, so artistically pure.
The Arabs have a God, the Jews have another, and the Catholics have another! And they're all fighting to maintain that they worship the one real God. Idiots!
Tarantino's 'Django' amused me very much. It is as made by an adult that was still a child.
Surrealism was necessary – essential, even – in the 1920s to bridge the gap between rationalism and the subconscious. It started something important. But by the early '60s, it had become petit-bourgeois; it was too intellectual and romantic, and had ground to a halt. It had become respectable.
Surrealism – in particular with Salvador Dali – was all about ego. It was all about extreme individualism.
Society feeds terror and is in turn terrorized; we are afraid to lose, so we consume.
Scientific thought and the miraculous unconscious are two waves in the same ocean.
Revolutions are of no us;, it is necessary to work on transforming the brain: on sowing a different knowledge/awareness, on creating a new conscience, that is like a magic box full of brains.
Psychoanalysis wants to heal with words and speaking, but sometimes with speaking, you realize nothing.
Pretty soon we will no longer have movies. We will have television series only.
People say I am mad. I am not mad. I am trying to heal my soul.
One day I was sitting in my own pain, and suddenly all the pain and troubles of the world came to me. I received all the pain of the world, all through my body.
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.
My wife is 37 years younger than me. I don't feel the difference.
My second wife, the mother of one of my sons, died of murder. I was not with her, but I could have saved her. I think.
My ideal audience is on the young side, eager to mutate and move to a higher level of consciousness. I want my images to turn the viewer's brain into what it is: a flying carpet.
My grandfather was a very mystical guy who travelled from Argentina to Chile, across the mountains with a donkey, carrying the Torah.
My films are like clouds: their meaning keeps changing every minute.
My films are completely new. I am not similar to anybody in the history of movies.
My father was an atheist, absent. He was a salesman; I was four years old when he told me that the end of life was death.
My father was a monster. A monster! I cut with my family when I was 23 and I never see them again.
My ego every day is more and more polite. I tame it.
My consciousness is without limits more than when I was 40 or 50.
Movies have an enormous power to open the mind and the heart and everything.
Maybe I am a prophet. I really hope one day there will come Confucius, Muhammad, Buddha and Christ to see me. And we will sit at a table, taking tea and eating some brownies.
Life is beautiful, what do you think? In the morning I say, 'Ah, I am alive still!' All my friends die already. I am alive. It is fantastic.
Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together.
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.
Lady Gaga has a lot of energy, and that is fantastic, but she is using old surrealist images.
It's so weird to be alive and to be inside a body.
It's not the same thing to make a work – a film, a book, a play – about youth as it is to make one about old age.
In order to be something, you must do something.
In movies, images cost – if you want a big image, it takes more money.
In history, psychedelic plants were used by priests and shamans with a desire to discover the interior.
In Mexico, when we want to speak deep secrets, we drink pulgue together. It is a drink made from the cactus plant, and when you take the bottle from your mouth, it leaves a string behind, between the mouth and the bottle, like a spider's web. It shows that the truth sticks inside.
In Chile, they have no movies. They have awful popular movies.
If you don't make errors, how can you be conscious?
If you are great, 'El Topo' is a great picture. If you are limited, 'El Topo' is limited.
If God gives you chocolate, you open your mouth, no?
I've seen 'Hamlet' many times, and Hamlet, he was just a hideous neurotic; he never changes. He doubts – all the way to the end, all the way until when he dies, he doubts.
I'm a purist.
I write books, I write for comic books, I give lectures… I live. And when the opportunity comes to do a picture, I do a picture.
I was like a mutant when I was a boy. I learned to read when I was four years old; it was like a miracle.
I was alone as a child. I lived in fairytales, adventures, Shakespeare. They are the friends, my books.
I was a happy man, never working. Sometimes I saw days with no money to eat. It was not so difficult.
I wanted to be loved by my father. I could do anything to be loved by my father.
I want to liberate my imagination and my mind with every kind of movie. That is what I wanted to do all my life.
I tweet 15 times a day to keep my brain stimulated.
I say, 'If somebody steals something of yours, then it's good; he loves what you do.'
I never wanted to study art. And I don't think you need to study art if you are an artist. It's even dangerous to go to school. You need to do whatever you want, as you want.
I live making comics. Comics is an industrial art but less suffering, because comics are for young people who are more adventurous. I do that. I live off comics, and then I write books, but when you want movies, you cannot make movies without money.
I liked Lady Gaga's meat dress. It was funny.
I like Hollywood movies. I like them like I like to eat scrambled eggs; I like them for fun.
I have always thought that, of all the arts, the cinema is the most complete art.
I hated Peter O'Toole. I wanted to kill that guy! When they said he was dead, I was happy. People said, 'Poor Peter O'Toole.' I was happy!
I had a big problem working with stars, because they are too expensive and have too many demands. Their names help you raise the money to make the movie, but then they demand close-ups. They change things. You end up doing things at their service instead of servicing the film.
I grew up in the north of Chile, and this is why there are a lot of religious symbols in my pictures: because the Catholic Church in Latin America is very strong.
I felt so alone as a boy because no one wanted to be friends with me.
I feel terrible for directors of TV because all the episodes have to look the same. They make a great series for five or six years, and then when it's canceled, they can't break out on their own.
I don't want to just love my family; I want to love all of humanity.
I don't see myself as a moviemaker only, you know? When I can do a picture, I do. But I don't work like a business, in pictures. I am not obliged to make one picture after the other in order to live.
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.
I don't live in France; I live in myself.
I don't have interest in life. Life has an interest in me.
I don't believe in failing. I have dignity.
I didn't want to make cinema so a person forgets himself and has a lot of fun. 'I forget myself, I am a little poor consumer.' I wanted to make a picture where someone who sees it say, 'This is me! This is me!'
I believe in mysticism, with an interior goal, and you are your own temple and your own priest. I don't believe anymore in religions, because you see today there are religious wars, prejudice, false morals, and the woman is despised. Religion is too old now; it's from another century, it's not for today.
I am still radical!
I am old, but I feel very beautiful.
I am not like Hitchcock, directing the reaction of the public or the audience. I don't like that. I think this is some kind of fascism – 'You need to react like that.' No. No. It's not like this; everyone needs to react as he can.
I am not a normal person. I am living in a normal body, but my mind is not normal.
I am not a man. I am not a human being inside. I am not that. I don't know what I am, but I am not that.
I am not a commercial industry creator. I don't believe in making art to make money.
I am like the rain: I go where I'm needed.
I am like a woman. I have a woman inside me.
I am an honest artist.
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.
I am a poet; I am not a worker. I need to be free.
I always think that art is a form of sacrifice.
Human society has dense borders – economic, religious and cultural – inculcated from an early age. We hate change.
George Harrison wanted to play the thief in 'Holy Mountain.'
For me, surrealism is in my blood; it's not an effort.
For me they are no different, reality and dreams.
For me 'Dune' was a dream – a big dream!
Five cats and a woman. That is all I need in life.
Failure doesn't exist. It's only a change of direction.
Every work of art belongs to his time. I would not paint again the Mona Lisa in the third dimension.
Every person, every artist makes his life an artwork.
Every one of us is a perfect human being, deformed by the family, the society and the culture.
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.
Death is an art, you know.
Books are finished.
Birds born in cages think that flying is a disease.
Being essentially a creator, I never set out to shock, always thinking about creating my work and not about the benefits it could produce.
All the pictures I could never do, I'll do it in comics. All the comics I do are the pictures I could never do.
All my life, I have never found a person who really loved this world. Every person hates the world, how he is.
Accepting death is a massive problem for everybody.
A true artist is always out of his time.
A person is not the same in his life at all times. Your consciousness is developing all the time. When I started making 'El Topo,' I was one person. When I finished that picture, I was another person.
A man doesn't cry. In my life, I've never cried. I cannot do it. I am a man. How will I cry?
'Santa Sangre' is the picture I love the best, myself, because 'El Topo' and 'The Holy Mountain' I made with my head, and 'Santa Sangre' I made with my feelings, with my heart. It's an emotional picture. And it's more real for me, that picture.
You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power – he's free again.
Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.
When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.
We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.
Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word 'modernity' if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.
There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.
The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.
The next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.
The name of 'reform' simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.
The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble.
The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.
Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.
Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.
Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.