Ingmar Bergman quotes - page 3

I've never been much smitten by Catholicism. I've never been committed to any religious dogma of any sort. ... For years the Catholics had me on their blacklist. Then along comes some sharp-witted pater and says 'Let's take this lad into the business, instead. (Ingmar Bergman)

The moments before he died, Christ was seized by doubt. Surely that must have been his greatest hardship? God's silence.

Ingmar Bergman

Everyone likes happiness, no one likes pain. But you can't have a rainbow without a little rain.

Ingmar Bergman

Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.

Ingmar Bergman

We went to morning services in variouis places and were deeply impressed by the spiritual poverty of these churches, by the lack of any congregation and the miserable spiritual status of the clergy, the poverty of their sermons, and the nonchalance and indifference of the ritual.

Ingmar Bergman

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

I was very cruel to actors and to other people. I think I was a very, very unpleasant young man. If I met the young Ingmar today, I think I would say, "You are very talented and I will see if I can help you, but I don't think I want anything else to do with you."

Ingmar Bergman

I was a peripheral fellow, regarded with deep suspicion from every quarter...

Ingmar Bergman

I infused the characters of Jof and Mia with something that was very important to me: the concept of the holiness of the human being. If you peel off the layers of various theologies, the holy always remains.

Ingmar Bergman

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

One of the strongest feelings I remember from my childhood is, precisely, of being humiliated; of being knocked about by words, acts, or situations.
Isn't it a fact that children are always feeling deeply humiliated in their relations with grown-ups and each other? I have a feeling children spend a good deal of their time humiliating one another. Our whole education is just one long humiliation, and it was even more so when I was a child. (Ingmar Bergman)

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

When film is not a document, it is dream.

Ingmar Bergman

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.

Ingmar Bergman

They worked until the building was completed - master builders, artists, labourers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and no one knows to this day who built the cathedral of Chartres. Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God.

Ingmar Bergman

The image that later became famous of the Dance of Death beneath the dark cloud was improvised in only a few minutes. That's how things can happen on the set.

Ingmar Bergman

I know the first film I ever saw - it must have been some time in 1924, when I was six or so... was Black Beauty.

Ingmar Bergman

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

When Jesus was nailed to the cross - and hung there in torment - he cried out - "God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken me?"

Ingmar Bergman

A French critic cleverly wrote that "with Autumn Sonata Bergman does Bergman." It is witty but unfortunate. For me, that is.

Ingmar Bergman

For me, hell has always been a most suggestive sort of place; but I've never regarded it as being located anywhere else than on earth. Hell is created by human beings - on earth! (Ingmar Bergman)

To the fanatical believer physical and spiritual suffering is beside the point, compared with salvation. That is why, to him, everything happening around him is irrelevant, a mirror-image, a mere will-o'-the-wisp. ... I can really never get shot of them, the fanatics. Whether they appear as religious fanatics or vegetarian fanatics makes no odds. They're catastrophic people.

Ingmar Bergman

Faith is a torment, did you know that? It is like loving someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call.

Ingmar Bergman

I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot. And they have been forced to make themselves useful.

Ingmar Bergman

Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal.

Ingmar Bergman

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Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman - Image

Photo: Joost Evers / Anefo, CC BY-SA 3.0

Occupation: Swedish Director
Born: July 14, 1918
Died: July 30, 2007
Quotes count: 82
Wikipedia: Ingmar Bergman

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