Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

Common sense says that chairs and tables exist independently of whether anyone happens to perceive them or not.

What she mostly wanted, he learned, was the same thing many people want--someone to notice she was there.

Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.

Out of the people that ever were, almost all of them are dead. There are way more dead people, and you're all gonna die and then you're gonna be dead for way longer than you're alive. Like that's mostly what you're ever gonna be. You're just dead people that didn't die yet.

As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.

Stretched out in front of me was my time as an adult, and then a skeleton, and then nothing except perhaps a few books on a few shelves.

‎"Matter flows from place to place, and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing; I find the reality thrilling.

Life in itself / Is nothing, / An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. / It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, / April / Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

But what do you believe? I don't just mean religion. What are you sure of?" "That once I was not and that now I am. That one day I shall no longer be.

People first. Dogs second. Things last.

The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.

Nothingness is the basis of everything.

Death is the room that is always empty.

When people are talking about you, it means that you exist.

Riches, power and fame last only for a few years! Why do people cling so desperately to these transitory things? Why can't people who have more than they need for themselves give that surplus to their fellow citizens? Why should some people have such a hard time during their few years on this earth?

The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor.

As an actor, you realize that your whole life is about arrivals and departures. You're always meeting people, you get really close, and then you all have to leave.

Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a Barbie doll, a vacuum cleaner. We're all such products.

These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. There were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship. Money is no substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you as I'm sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you're looking for, no matter how much of them you have.

Meeting people in a genuine way and feeling like there is a vital and meaningful connection going on makes me come alive.

Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window, and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.

In fact living is dying.

Oh, this coming back to an empty house,' Rupert thought, when he had seen her safely up to her door. People - though perhaps it was only women - seemed to make so much of it. As if life itself were not as empty as the house one was coming back to.

Men had reached into the scrub and along its boundaries, had snatched what they could get and had gone away, uneasy in that vast indifferent peace; for a man was nothing, crawling ant-like among the myrtle bushes under the pines. Now they were gone, it was as though they had never been. The silence of the scrub was primordial. The wood-thrush crying across it might have been the first bird in the world-or the last.