Jim Henson Quotes

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.

[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.

There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.

The most sophisticated people I know - inside they are all children.

If you care about what you do and work hard at it, there isn't anything you can't do if you want to.

Life's like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.

Watch out for each other. Love everyone and forgive everyone, including yourself. Forgive your anger. Forgive your guilt. Your shame. Your sadness. Embrace and open up your love, your joy, your truth, and most especially your heart.

When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope is to leave the world a little better for having been there.

My hope still is to leave the world a bit better than when I got here.

Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back the child you have stolen, for my will is as strong as yours and my kingdom as great. You have no power over me!

As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make-believe continues into adulthood.

Simple is good.

Please watch out for each other and love and forgive everybody. It's a good life, enjoy it.

It all ends in one of two ways: either someone gets eaten or something blows up.

I believe that we form our own lives, that we create our own reality, and that everything works out for the best.

No time is wasted time

Life is meant to be fun, and joyous, and fulfilling.

I don't know exactly where ideas come from, but when I'm working well ideas just appear. I've heard other people say similar things - so it's one of the ways I know there's help and guidance out there. It's just a matter of our figuring out how to receive the ideas or information that are waiting to be heard.

Life's like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending. We've done just what we set out to do. Thanks to the lovers, the dreamers and you.

Yes, its one of the basic truths of the universe,....Things don't disappear. They just change, and change and change again.

I guess I was wrong when I said I never promised anyone. I promised me.

Who said that every wish would be heard and answered when wished on an evening star? Somebody thought of it and someone believed it, and look what its done so far.

Just fear me and love me...and do as I say...and I will be your slave.

If you can't beat them. Join them

I try hard not to judge anyone, and I try to bless everyone who is a part of my life, particularly anyone with whom I am having any problems

We see with our eyes. We know with our hearts. Outside...Inside.

I think if you study--if you learn too much of what others have done, you may tend to take the same direction as everybody else.

List of Artists Who Created Fantasy Worlds to Try and Cure Bouts of Sadness 1. Italo Calvino 2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez 3. Jim Henson and Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths 4. The creator of MySpace 5. Richard Brautigan 6. J.K. Rowling 7. The inventor of the children's toy Lite-Brite 8. Ann Sexton 9. David Foster Wallace 10. Gaugin and the Caribbean 11. Charles Schulz 12. Liam Rector

I really do believe that all of you are at the beginning of a wonderful journey. As you start traveling down that road of life, remember this: There are never enough comfort stops. The places you're going to are never on the map. And once you get that map out, you won't be able to re-fold it no matter how smart you are. So forget the map, roll down the windows, and whenever you can pull over and have picnic with a pig. And if you can help it never fly as cargo.

The beauty of nature has been one of the great inspirations in my life.

(Lisa Henson about her father) He admired the job of the man who walks along the road picking up trash with a long stick. He thought that guy had a great job, walking along with a stick, enjoying the road, and doing only good in the world, with hundreds of small actions.

Everything. I have done everything you wanted...You asked that the child be taken. I took him. You cowered before me. I was frightening...I have reordered time...I have turned the world upside down...And I have done it all for you. I am exhausted from living up to your expectations.

The most sophisticated people I know--inside they're all children. We never really loose a certain sense we had when we were kids.

Here's some simple advice: Always be yourself. Never take yourself to seriously. And beware of advice from experts, pigs, and members of Parliament.

When people told themselves their past with stories, explained their present with stories, foretold the future with stories, the best place by the fire was kept for the storyteller.

Please watch out for each other and love and forgive everybody. It's a good life, enjoy it.' - Jim

Cara: *Flies* Gen: What? I don't have wings! Cara: Ofcourse not! You're a boy.

I know that it's easier to portray a world that's filled with cynicism and anger, where problems are solved with violence. What's a whole lot tougher is to offer alternatives, to present other ways conflicts can be resolved, and to show that you can have a positive impact on your world. To do that, you have to put yourself out on a limb, take chances, and run the risk of being called a do-gooder.

Jim [Henson] had written letters to his five children to be opened only after his death. Brian read from his. Jim wrote, 'Be good to each other. Love and forgive everybody.' I remembered Jim telling me that he never wasted energy on hating anybody; he had too much thinking to do.

Someday we'll find it the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers and me

I am a teller of stories...a weaver of dreams. I can dance, sing, and in the right weather stand on my head. I know seven words of Latin. I have a little magic and a trick or two. I know the proper way to meet a dragon, can fight dirty but not fair, and once swallowed thirty oysters in a minute. I am not domestic. I am a luxury, and in that sense, necessary.

An owl is born with all his questions answered.

I don't want'a die... I have other plans!" -Fraggle Rock

Here we are sitting at the Waldorf in a conference room... and in comes someone with long hair and wearing an outfit dripping leather. I remember whispering to Dave Connell, "How do we know that man back there isn't going to throw a bomb up here or toss a hand grenade?" Connell, always one to keep a cool head, assessed the situation with care. He discreetly turned his head toward the back and realized he recognized the tall, angular man carrying a small purse under his arm. A slight smile curled as he assured Cooney the hippie back there posed no threat. "Not likely, that's Jim Henson," he said.

Life is meant to be fun, and joyous, and fulfilling. May each of yours be that - having each of you as a child of mine has certainly been one of the good things in my life. Know that I've always loved each of you with an eternal, bottomless love. A love that has nothing to do with each other, for I feel my love for each of you is total and all-encompassing. Please watch out for each other and love and forgive everybody. It's a good life, enjoy it.

Moving right along In search of good times And good news, With good friends you can't lose. This could become a habit. Opportunity just knocked, Let's reach out and grab it, Together we'll nab it, We'll hitch-hike, bus, or yellow cab it.

When I was young," wrote Jim, "my ambition was to be one of the people who makes a difference in this world. My hope still is to leave this world a little bit better for my being here." And he did.

I think there are lots of ways of leading very good lives and growing spiritually. This process of growth goes on whether we believe it or not.

life is a kind of Labyrinth, with all its twists and turns, its straight paths and its occasional dead ends.

When single shines the triple sun, What was sundered and undone Shall be whole, the two made one By Gelfling hand, or else by none.

Nothing was fair. If you expected fairness, you would be forever disappointed.

You are cruel, Sarah. We are well matched, you and I. I need your cruelty, just as you need mine.

I don't know where the ideas come from. It's just a matter of us figuring out how to receive the ideas waiting to be heard Muppet Exhibit Seattle EMP Jim Henson

She wondered what was the point of doing anything. She might as well go this way, or that, or stand still, or cry. Maybe just havin' yourself a good time was the best anyone could hope for.

Beware of artists. They mix with all classes of society and are therefore the most dangerous.

Quite often, young lady, it seems we're not getting anywhere, when in fact we are.

Sometimes I have trouble falling asleep but it's not so bad I don't worry and I don't weep. In fact I'm glad. Because I get up off my pillow and I flip on the light. I get down and get hip in the still of the night I stretch and I yawn and then I breathe real deep And dance myself to sleep. I hoof around my beddie just a-tappin' my toes Before I know what's happened I'm a-ready to doze Got some partners I can count the boogie-woogie sheep I dance myself to sleep.

Little stones, pebbles,” urVa said. “Big stones, boulders. Even bigger, Thra itself. Stones come in all shapes and sizes. All things are connected. What we surrender, we may be given. What we lose, we may find again. For every one there is another.” “Well,

Wish not for treasure you can hold, No gleaming jewels, bright and cold, For finer still than pearl or gold, The treasure of a tale well told...

The feeling of accomplishment is more real and satisfying than finishing a good meal or looking at one’s accumulated wealth.”[28]

art is—a sacrifice of one’s time, one’s lifetime, to make others feel something.

Creativity. Taking something enormously strange and somehow making it strangely familiar.

Sometimes," the Wise Man observed, "to need is...to let go.

Sarah took a deep breath and set off along the passageway again. A clump of lichen on the gatepost opened its eyes and watched her go. The eyes, on tendrils, had an anxious look, and when she had gone some distance away the clump, swiveling its eyes toward each other, commenced to gossip among itself. Most of it disapproved of the direction she had taken. You could tell that from the way the eyes looked meaningfully into each other. Lichen knows about directions.

Jim Henson's body was gone, and yet that powerful presence-that undefinable 'something' that compelled men to seek his appreciation and approval, and that women found somehow irresistible-would always remain. Anyone who had ever smiled as Ernie tried to play a rhyming game with Bert, or laughed as Kermit had chased Fozzie off the stage, arms flailing, had felt it. Anyone who had ever wished they could explore a Fraggle hole, save the world with a crystal shard, or dance with a charismatic goblin king had been touched by it.

You can propose on our honeymoon [Miss Piggy to Kermit the Frog]

For art to truly affect us, it needs to be, in a sense, “given.

Peoples is peoples. -Pete-

When done right, it's possible to be silly and subversive at the same time.

...what else is resistance if not loving in the face of danger?

If The Muppet Show had a basketball team, the score would always be Frog 99, Chaos 98." (Jerry Juhl on the crazy workload of The Muppet Show)

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”-Jim Henson

I believe that my father had some kind of direct experience of the spiritual nature of reality, maybe a vision, that he tried to convey perhaps unconsciously in his work- that there is a different, more loving and transcendent reality beyond this world of imagined conflicts.

The attitude you have as a parent is what your kids will learn from more than what you tell them,” Jim said later. “They don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.

One viewer - a Mr. Dionne from California... fired off an angry, rambling letter, complaining haughtily that "the most disciplined attention I could give [The Cube] was a belch from the grave of Marcus Aurelius, occasioned, I might add, by the dead weight of its own dust caving in on itself." Two weeks later came Jim's one-sentence response: Dear Mr. Dionne: What the fuck are you talking about? Yours truly, JIM HENSON

We both swore as something lumbered into view. It was huge. And shaggy. It had orange-brown fur and forklift-shaped tusks. It looked like it had chewed through the barbed wire around Jim Henson’s workshop and fled into the wild.

Then you will find what you want only as long as you stay in your dream. Once abandon it, and you are at the mercy of other people's dreams. They will make of you what they want you to be. Forget them, Sarah, trust to your dream.

It is our responsibility to keep telling these tales--to tell them in a way that they teach and entertain and give meaning to our lives,' he [Jim] said later. 'This is not merely an obligation, it's something we must do because we love doing it.

Everything altered. The room was the same as it had always been, night and morning, day after day for as long as Sarah could remember, but she was seeing it with new eyes. It was all fabricated from pieces of scrap, everything was rubbish, relics. All her things, the furniture, even the walls, the whole room was a garbage heap, a dead shrine to a spirit that had fled.

When Jim left the planet so suddenly, all of us who loved him, worked with him, were inspired by him, gathered in New York City. We were like dandelion seeds clinging to the stem and to each other. And on May 16th, [the day Jim died] the wind began to blow. There’s no stem any more. We’re all floating on the breeze. And it’s scary and exhilarating, and there’s nothing we can do about it. But gradually, we’ll all drift to the ground and plant ourselves. And no matter what we grow into, it’ll be influenced by Jim. We’re Jim’s seeds. And it’s not only those of us who knew him. Everyone who was touched by his work is a Jim-seed.

Perhaps more important, it also showed that you could get away with being a little dangerous, provocative, or just plain deep if you did it with a smile on your face and remembered that entertainment always came first. When done right, it’s possible to be silly and subversive at the same time.

En alguna parte al borde de tu imaginación hay un Laberinto Se tuerce y gira como malvados pensamientos, y nadie... ningún hombre, mujer o niño... ha alcanzado nunca el centro. Allí, dentro de las paredes de la Ciudad de los Goblins, está el castillo de Jareth, el rey de los goblins. Los Goblins son asquerosas criaturitas cuyo mayor deleite es robar bebés y convertirlos en goblins. Pero esto solo puede ocurrir si tú lo deseas. Debes pronunciar las palabras adecuadas para que el deseo se convierta en realidad. "Deseo que los goblins vengan y se te lleven ahora mismo" son las palabras correctas. Cuando los Goblins las oigan, vendrán... y vinieron

We intuitively reject art when the cost to make it is less than the cost to buy it.

In many ways, Henson was a slave to his artistic gift—but to no one else. This is the ideal state for an artist.

Don’t let your day job take over your life simply because it has a more immediate payoff.

You see, not all of Henson’s projects made money. The Muppet Movie did, but The Muppets Take Manhattan didn’t.

This guy was like a sailor who had studied the compass and found that there was a fifth direction in which one could sail." (Jerry Juhl on being offered a job with Muppets, Inc.)

-Algunas veces-observó el Hombre Sabio- necesitar es... dejar marchar.

A king...we need a king...Such delicious eyebrows...He's only got to ask...Hahahaha He's only got to wish...and the crown is hisssss.

The attitude you have as a parent is what your kids will learn from more than what you tell them. They don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.

As I try to zero in on what’s important for the Muppets,” Jim said years later, “I think it’s a sense of innocence, naiveté—you know, the experience of a simple person meeting life.” The

The Dark Crystal, released in 1982, is an artistic masterpiece, which Henson himself described as “a rich fruitcake, full of different ingredients, and every bite you discover something new and delicious.

I think it's not particularly necessary to lead a religious life. People progress just as well in music, or art, or math or science or gardening or whatever. It all seems to work as well and the process is good.

As each guest entered, they were handed a long wand—actually a puppeteer’s arm rod—with a bright foam butterfly attached at the end, one of the thousands put together by the Muppet Workshop over the last three days.

If you take a character and you call him a frog … you immediately give the audience a handle. You’re assisting the audience to understand; you’re giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don’t give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it’s almost more pure. It’s a cooler thing. It’s a difference of sort of warmth and cool.

Jim was shaken by the impending death of his grandfather—he had, after all, been partly named for him—but Jim would do as he always did in the face of grief: he would build and create. Foraging for any suitable materials, Jim settled on his mother’s old felt coat, and as he leaned over the table in the Hensons’ living room he sewed a simple puppet body, with a slightly pointed face, out of the faded turquoise material. For eyes, he simply glued two halves of a Ping-Pong ball—with slashed circles carefully inked in black on each—to the top of the head. That was it. From the simplest of materials—and, perhaps appropriately, from a determination to bring a bit of order from darkness—Kermit was born.

comment—and colleagues would learn to

The folly and the glory of the world... the wild, the wise and the wicked... the hero, the madman, the wanderer and the fool... the earth, the seas, the wild heavens... are all part of an endless, unfolding tapestry, woven by time and hemmed by memory.

Several years earlier, when Henson Associates’ insurance provider had notified Jim that it would no longer be paying all of Christine’s medical expenses, Jim had insisted that Henson Associates change insurance companies to ensure her costs would continue to be fully covered. Nelson had gone to Jim’s office and tearfully thanked him in person, nearly choking on emotion. “Jerry,” said Jim, smiling, “that’s what insurance companies are for.

I live kind of within myself as a person, so my outlet has always been the Muppets; therefore, I tend to do sort of wildly extroverted characters,” said Jim.