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Ingmar Bergman Quotes

Total quotes: 23
“Here, in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity. It oozes out of me like a broken tube of toothpaste; it doesn’t want to stay within the confines of my body. A strange feeling of weight and volume. Soul volume perhaps, which rises like clouds of smoke and envelops my body.”
— Ingmar Bergman, Ingmar Bergman's The Silence: Pictures in the Typewriter, Writings on the Screen
Tagged: Solitude, Feeling, humanity, human, broken, Confines, Limits, Body, strange, Weight, Soul, Clouds, Spirit
“People think there's a solution... If everything is distributed in the proper quarters, put into the right pigeonholes, everything will be fine. But I'm not so sure. … Nothing, absolutely nothing at all has emerged out of all these ideas of faith and scepticism, all these convulsions, these puffings and blowings. For many of my fellow human beings on the other hand, I'm aware that these problems still exist — and exist as a terrible reality. I hope this generation will be the last to live under the scourge of religious anxiety.”
— Ingmar Bergman, Jonas Sima interview
Tagged: solution, Faith, Problems, Religion
“My basic view of things is — not to have any basic view of things. From having been exceedingly dogmatic, my views on life have gradually dissolved. They don't exist any longer... I've a strong impression that our world is about to go under. Our political systems are deeply compromised and have no further uses. Our social behavior patterns — interior and exterior — have proved a fiasco. The tragic thing is, we neither can nor want to, nor have the strength to alter course. It's too late for revolutions, and deep down inside ourselves we no longer even believe in their positive effects. Just around the corner an insect world is waiting for us — and one day it's going to roll in over our ultra-individualized existence. Otherwise I'm a respectable social democrat.”
— Ingmar Bergman, Stig Bjorkman interview
Tagged: View, Belief, Dogma, Life, Existence
“When Jesus was nailed to the cross — and hung there in torment - he cried out — "God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken me?" He cried out as loud as he could. He thought that his heavenly father had abandoned him. He believed everything he'd ever preached was a lie. The moments before he died, Christ was seized by doubt. Surely that must have been his greatest hardship? God's silence.”
— Ingmar Bergman, Winter Light
Tagged: Doubt, Hardship, test, Silence
“Our social relationships are limited, most of the time, to gossip and criticizing people's behavior. This observation slowly pushed me to isolate from the so-called social life. My days pass by in solitude.”
— Ingmar Bergman, Wild Strawberries
Tagged: Relationships, Social Awareness, Observation, Solitude, Loneliness, Isolation
“I don't want to produce a work of art that the public can sit and suck aesthetically…. I want to give them a blow in the small of the back, to scorch their indifference, to startle them out of their complacency.”
— Ingmar Bergman
Tagged: Art, Form of Art, difference, Uniqueness, film
“The demons are innumerable, arrive at the most inappropriate times and create panic and terror... but I have learned that if I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage.... Lilies often grow out of carcasses' arseholes.”
— Ingmar Bergman, Bergman talks of his dreams and demons in rare interview
Tagged: Demons, Evil, Negative Forces
“Film has dream, film has music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.”
— Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography
Tagged: film, Dream, Music, Art, Form of Art, Consciousness, emotions, Soul
“When film is not a document, it is dream.”
— Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography
Tagged: film, Documentation, Dream, Imagination
“I am so 100 percent Swedish... Someone has said a Swede is like a bottle of ketchup — nothing and nothing and then all at once — splat. I think I'm a little like that. And I think I'm Swedish because I like to live here on this island. You can't imagine the loneliness and isolation in this country. In that way, I'm very Swedish — I don't dislike to be alone.”
— Ingmar Bergman, Ingmar Bergman: Summing Up A Life In Film
Tagged: Swedish, Loneliness, Isolation, Alone
“I am very much aware of my own double self... The well-known one is very under control; everything is planned and very secure. The unknown one can be very unpleasant. I think this side is responsible for all the creative work — he is in touch with the child. He is not rational, he is impulsive and extremely emotional. Perhaps it is not even a "he," but a "she.”
— Ingmar Bergman, Ingmar Bergman: Summing Up A Life In Film
Tagged: Personality, Subconscious, Control, Creativity
“I make all my decisions on intuition. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.”
— Ingmar Bergman, Ingmar Bergman Confides in Students
Tagged: Decisions, Intuition, Intellect
“I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.”
— Ingmar Bergman
Tagged: Scripts, Writing, film
“I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being. It's a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then.”
— Ingmar Bergman, Ingmar Bergman Directs
Tagged: Human Being, wholeness, Personality, dignity
“In this profession, I always admire people who are going on, who have a sort of idea and, however crazy it is, are putting it through; they are putting people and things together, and they make something. I always admire this.”
— Ingmar Bergman, On Jean-Luc Godard in an interview with John Simon
Tagged: Profession, idea, Creativity, admiration
“Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death — this infantile fixation of mine — was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry — with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.'”
— Ingmar Bergman, Interview with Charles Thomas Samuels
Tagged: Fear, Death, film, Painting, Art
“The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility. Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation.”
— Ingmar Bergman, Four Screenplays
Tagged: Create, Creativity, Gift, Art, Creation
“People ask what are my intentions with my films — my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it.”
— Ingmar Bergman, Four Screenplays
Tagged: Intention, Aim, Truth, Telling The Truth, Human Condition, Perspective
“I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect.”
— Ingmar Bergman, Four Screenplays
Tagged: Art, film, Music, emotions, Intellect
“When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination.”
— Ingmar Bergman, Four Screenplays
Tagged: film, Experience, Feeling, Illusion, Imagination
“Self-portraiture is something one should never get involved in, since it is wrong to lie even though one endeavours to tell the truth.”
— Ingmar Bergman, Ingmar's self portrait
Tagged: Self-portrait, Lies, Truth, Self & Identity
“My heart is empty. The emptiness is a mirror turned toward my own face.”
— Antonius Block, The Seventh Seal
Tagged: Tired, Empty, Identity
“I am conscious about myself and everything, and then suddenly, or slowly, my conscious fades out. Switches off. And it’s not existing, and that’s a marvelous feeling. That from existing, I am not existing. And at that moment, nothing can happen to me.”
— Ingmar Bergman, Persona: A Poem in Images
Tagged: Consciousness, Existence, Feeling
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