100 Quotes by Jim Morrison
Jim Morrison, the enigmatic frontman of The Doors, epitomized the counterculture spirit of the 1960s. With his mesmerizing vocals and poetic lyrics, Morrison challenged societal norms and pushed artistic boundaries. He was a charismatic figure, capturing the essence of rebellion and artistic expression in an era marked by change and unrest. Morrison's lyrical prowess and magnetic stage presence remain legendary, immortalizing him as a symbol of the era's artistic revolution. However, his struggles with addiction and inner demons also serve as a cautionary tale, illustrating the duality of fame and creativity. Jim Morrison's legacy lives on as a multifaceted artist who transcended musical genres and left an indelible mark on rock and roll history.
Jim Morrison Quotes
Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.
There are things known and things unknown and in between are The Doors.
People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that's bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they're afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it.
A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.
Time to live, time to lie, time to laugh, and time to die. Take it easy baby. Take it as it comes.
People fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend.
Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.
The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask.
It may have been in pieces, but I gave you the best of me.
Give me songs to sing and emerald dreams to dream and I'll give you love unfolding.
I think people resist freedom because they're afraid of the unknown. But it's ironic....That unknown was once very well known. It's where our souls belong. The only solution is to confront them - confront yourself - with the greatest fear imaginable. Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, fear has no power, and fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.
Nobody would stay interested in me if I was normal
Being drunk is a good disguise. I drink so I can talk to assholes. This includes me.
How can I set free anyone who doesn't have the guts to stand up alone and declare his own freedom? I think it's a lie - people claim they want to be free - everybody insists that freedom is what they want the most, the most sacred and precious thing a man can possess. But that's bullshit! People are terrified to be set free - they hold on to their chains. They fight anyone who tries to break those chains. It's their security. How can they expect me or anyone else to set them free if they don't really want to be free?
Where's your will to be weird?
The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are...There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.
Friends can help each other. A true friend is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself - and especially to feel. Or, not feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment is fine with them. That's what real love amounts to - letting a person be what he really is.
People are terrified to be set free - they hold on to their chains. They fight anyone who tries to break those chains. It's their security... How can they expect me or anyone else to set them free if they don't really want to be free?
Sex is full of lies. The body tries to tell the truth. But, it's usually too battered with rules to be heard, and bound with pretenses so it can hardly move. We cripple ourselves with lies.
You feel your strength in the experience of pain.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
Twentieth-century culture's disease is the inability to feel their reality. People cluster to TV, soap operas, movies, theater, pop idols and they have wild emotion over symbols. But in the reality of their own lives, they're emotionally dead.
This is the strangest life I've ever known.
We hide ourselves in our music to reveal ourselves.
I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos-especially activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom... Rather than starting inside, I start outside and reach the mental through the physical.
Let's just say I was testing the bounds of reality...
I've noticed that when people are joking they're usually dead serious, and when they're serious, they're usually pretty funny.
Actually I don't remember being born, it must have happened during one of my black outs.
The future is uncertain but the end is always near.
The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.
Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain.
I want to have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.
Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.
All our lives we sweat and save, Building for a shallow grave.
We could plan a murder. Or start a religion.
A man searching for paradise lost can seem a fool to those who never sought the other world.
I see myself as an intelligent, sensitive human, with the soul of a clown which forces me to blow it at the most important moments.
Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.
Take it easy baby, take it as it comes - specialize in having fun!
Most people love you for who you pretend to be.
Love cannot save you from your own fate.
We fear violence less than our own feelings. Personal, private, solitary pain is more terrifying than what anyone else can inflict.
No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.
I am troubled, immeasurably by your eyes. I am struck by the feather of your soft reply. The sound of glass speaks quick, disdain and conceals what your eyes fight to explain.
Blood is the rose of mysterious union.
Some people surrender their freedom willingly but others are forced to surrender it. Imprisonment begins with birth. Society, parents they refuse to allow you to keep the freedom you were born with. There are subtle ways to punish a person for daring to feel. You see that everyone around you has destroyed his true feeling nature. You imitate what you see.
All the poems have wolves in them. All but one. The most beautiful one of all. She dances in a ring of fire and throws off the challenge with a shrug.
Maybe primitive people have less bullshit to let go of, to give up. A person has to be willing to give up everything—not just wealth. All the bullshit he's been taught—all society's brainwashing. You have to let go of all that to get to the other side. Most people aren't willing to do that.
That’s what real love amounts to - letting a person be what he really is....Most people love you for who you pretend to be....To keep their love, you keep pretending - performing. You get to love your pretense...It’s true, we’re locked in an image, an act.
I believe in a long, prolonged, derangement of the senses in order to obtain the unknown.
There may be a time when we'll attend Weather Theaters to recall the sensation of rain.
I wouldn't mind dying in a plane crash. It'd be a good way to go. I don't want to die in my sleep, or of old age, or OD... I want to feel what it's like. I want to taste it, hear it, smell it. Death is only going to happen to you once; I don't want to miss it
Death makes angels of us all and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as ravens claws.
Death Makes Angels of us all.
When you make your peace with authority, you become authority.
I think the highest and lowest points are the important ones. Anything else is just...in between.
The time to hesitate is through.
A hero is someone who rebels or seems to rebel against the facts of existence and seems to conquer them. Obviously that can only work at moments. It can't be a lasting thing. That's not saying that people shouldn't keep trying to rebel against the facts of existence. Someday, who knows, we might conquer death, disease and war.
Drugs are a bet with your mind.
No one here gets out alive.
Violence isn't always evil. What's evil is the infatuation with violence.
Blake said that the body was the soul's prison unless the five senses are fully developed and open. He considered the senses the 'windows of the soul.' When sex involves all the senses intensely, it can be like a mystical experence.
I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning.
The grand highway is crowded w/lovers & searchers & leavers so eager to please & forget. Wilderness.
I like people who shake other people up and make them feel uncomfortable.
Getting drunk: you're in complete control up to a point. It's your choice, every time you take a sip. You have a lot of small choices. It's like, I guess it's the difference between suicide and slow capitulation . . .
There's nothing wrong with being a large mammal.
When sex involves all the senses intensely, it can be like a mystical experience.
Some of the worst mistakes of my life have been haircuts.
Cancel my subscription to the resurrection.
There are no laws, there are no rules, just grab your friend and love him.
I wonder why people like to believe I'm high all the time. I guess maybe they think someone else can take their trip for them.
We are content in the 'given' in sensation's quest. We have been metamorphosised from a mad body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes staring in the dark.
Choose the day and choose the sign of your day! The day's divinity! First thing you see!!
Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.
You cannot petition the lord with prayer!
Do you know how pale & wanton thrillful comes death on a strange hour unannounced, unplanned for like a scaring over-friendly guest you've brought to bed Death makes angels of us all & gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as raven's claws
No one gets out of here alive.
Music is your only friend until the end...
The world we suggest is a new wild west. A sensuous evil world. Strange and haunting, the path of the sun.
We're reaching for death on the end of a candle We're trying for something that's already found us
I think that phrase is the most horrible phrase in the English language - 'I don't know.' It's terribly embarrassing.
I pressed her thigh and death smiled.
How can I set free anyone who doesn't have the guts to stand up alone and declare his own freedom?
People are strange when you're a stranger.
Rather than starting inside, I start outside and reach the mental through the physical.
What have they done to the earth? What have they done to our fair sister? Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn And tied her with fences and dragged her down
There are images I need to complete my own reality.
In the beginning we were creating our music, ourselves, every night . . . starting with a few outlines, maybe a few words for a song. Sometimes we worked out in Venice, looking at the surf. We were together a lot and it was good times for all of us. Acid, sun, friends, the ocean, and poetry and music.
I think, in these days, especially in the States, you have to be a politician or an assassin or something, to really be a superstar.
I like any reaction I can get with my music. Just anything to get people to think.
Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding/Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind.
We have assembled inside this ancient / and insane theatre / To propagate our lust for life / and flee the swarming wisdom / of the streets
Take an Indian home to lunch.
I've always thought comparisons were useless and ugly. It is a short cut to thinking.
Each day is a drive through history.
Windows work two ways, mirrors one way. You never walk through mirrors or swim through windows.
I'm kind of hooked to the game of art and literature; my heroes are artists and writers.
The gate is straight, Deep and wide, Break on through to the other side...
Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel.
Cinema returns us to anima, religion of matter, which gives each thing its special divinity and sees gods in all things and beings. Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.
Out here on the perimeter there are no stars. Out here we is stoned. Immaculate.
The best songs come unasked for. You don't have to think about them . . . Summer is good for songs. When it's real warm, if you have a sense of freedom, not a lot on your mind, and a feeling there's plenty of time, it just seems to be a good climate for music.
I'll never wake up in a good mood again. I'm tired of these stinky boots
No one thought up being. He who thinks he has, step forward.
Man, I'm sick of doubt.
The world becomes an apparently infinite, yet possibly finite, card game. Image combinations, permutations, comprise the world game.
Music inflames temperament.
Let's just say I was testing the bounds of reality. I was curious to see what would happen. That's all it was curiosity.
Give form to the passing World. Freeways are a drama.
Are you a lucky little lady in the City of Light? Or just another lost angel... City of Night?
Do you know we are ruled by T.V.?
I think in art, but especially in films, people are trying to confirm their own existences.
It's like gambling somehow. You go out for a night of drinking and you don't know where your going to end up the next day. It could work out good or it could be disastrous. It's like the throw of the dice.
That's what real love amounts to - letting a person be what he really is.
Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness. Jealousy we understood and thought natural--a desire to have what somebody else had; but envy was a strange, new feeling for us.
I like to let each thing happen - direct it a little consciously, maybe - but just kind of follow the vibrations I get in each particular circumstance. We don't plan theatrics. We hardly ever know which set we'll play.
Another flashing chance at bliss Another kiss, another kiss
The best songs just come unasked for. You don't have to think about them. Summer is a good time for songs.
I love the friends I have gathered together on this thin raft.
You live you die and death not ends it.
All games contain the idea of death.
All our songs are about love, travel and death.
Los Angeles is a city looking for a ritual to join its fragments, and The Doors are looking for such a ritual also. A kind of electric wedding. We hide ourselves in the music to reveal ourselves.
I like any reaction I can get with my music. Just anything to get people to think. I mean if you can get a whole room full of drunk, stoned people to actually wake up and think, you're doing something.
My great joy is to give form to reality. Music is a great release, a great enjoyment to me. Eventually I'd like to write something of great importance. That's my ambition - to write something worthwhile.
O great creator of being grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives.
The spectator is a dying animal.
Where are the feasts we were promised? Where is the wine, the new wine, dying on the vine.
The kind of people who can assemble huge crowds into one spot will be the major influences on mass culture in the next decade. The rock enthusiasts have created some of the most exciting theatrical events on the planet.
Resident mockery, give us an hour for magic.
The time you wait subtracts the joy The heads the angel you destroy
― Jim Morrison Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
