Top 40 Akira Kurosawa Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Man is a genius when he is dreaming.”

— Akira Kurosawa

Featured in: Quotes About Dreams, Imagination Quotes

2. “In a mad world, only the mad are sane.”

— Akira Kurosawa

Featured in: Crazy Quotes, Depression Quotes

3. “I can’t afford to hate anyone. I don’t have that kind of time.”

— Akira Kurosawa

4. “If you want to be a great director, be a great screenwriter.”

— Akira Kurosawa

5. “Man is a genius when he dreams. Dream what you are capable of. The harder you dream it, the sooner it will come true.”

— Akira Kurosawa

6. “It is the power of memory that gives rise to the power of imagination.”

— Akira Kurosawa

7. “The great appeal of film is its relatability.”

— Akira Kurosawa

8. “To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.”

— Akira Kurosawa

9. “The characters in my films try to live honestly and make the most of the lives they’ve been given. I believe you must live honestly and develop your abilities to the full. People who do this are the real heroes.”

— Akira Kurosawa

10. “I am not a special person, I am not especially strong; I am not especially gifted. I simply do not like to show my weakness, and I hate to lose, so I am a person who tries hard. That’s all there is to me.”

— Akira Kurosawa

11. “To be an artist means to search, to find and look at these realities. To be an artist means to never look away.”

— Akira Kurosawa

12. “The truth is in the mystery.”

— Akira Kurosawa

13. “Take me, subtract movies, and you get zero.”

— Akira Kurosawa

14. “Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing.”

— Akira Kurosawa

15. “If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of.”

— Akira Kurosawa

16. “I suppose all of my films have a common theme. If I think about it, though, the only theme I can think of is really a question: Why can’t people be happier together?”

— Akira Kurosawa

17. “A truly good movie is enjoyable too. There’s nothing complicated about it.”

— Akira Kurosawa

18. “The root of any film project for me is this inner need to express something. What nurtures this root and makes it grow into a tree is the script. What makes the tree bear flowers and fruit is the directing.”

— Akira Kurosawa

19. “If I were to write anything at all, it would turn out to be nothing but talk about movies. In other words, take ‘myself,’ subtract ‘movies,’ and the result is ‘zero.’”

— Akira Kurosawa

20. “For me, filmmaking combines everything. That’s the reason I’ve made cinema my life’s work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.”

— Akira Kurosawa

21. “The Japanese see self-assertion as immoral and self- sacrifice as the sensible course to take in life.”

— Akira Kurosawa

22. “I have no idea who the characters are, later, their personalities take over anything I might want to do. I end up writing not from my own will, but from theirs-they come alive as I write and make me do things that I couldn’t have planned.”

— Akira Kurosawa

23. “The role of the artist is to not look away.”

— Akira Kurosawa

24. “Human beings share the same common problems. A film can only be understood if it depicts these properly.”

— Akira Kurosawa

25. “Page 61: No matter where I go in the world, although I can’t speak any foreign language, I don’t feel out of place. I think of earth as my home. If everyone thought this way, people might notice just how foolish international friction is and the would be put an end to it.”

— Akira Kurosawa

26. “There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.”

— Akira Kurosawa

27. “I like unformed characters. This may be because, no matter how old I get, I am still unformed myself.”

— Akira Kurosawa

28. “The films an audience really enjoys are the ones that were enjoyable in the making. Yet pleasure in the work can’t be achieved unless you know you have put all of your strength into it and have done your best to make it come alive. A film made in this spirit reveals the hearts of the crew.”

— Akira Kurosawa

29. “In order to find reality, each must search for his own universe, look for the details that contribute to this reality7 that one feels under the surface of things. To be an artist means to search, to find and look at these realities. To be an artist means never to look away.”

— Akira Kurosawa

30. “Ignorance is a kind of insanity in the human animal.”

— Akira Kurosawa

31. “But I prefer to think of my brother as a negative strip of film that led to my own development as a positive image.”

— Akira Kurosawa

32. “Granting that there is some truth to the theory that defects in society give rise to the emergence of criminals, I still maintain that those who use this theory as a defense of criminality are overlooking the fact that there are many people in this defective society who survive without resorting to crime. The argument to the contrary is pure sophistry.”

— Akira Kurosawa

33. “This is probably true of human life everywhere – a light exterior hides a dark underside.”

— Akira Kurosawa

34. “Of course, compared to these two illustrious masters, Renoir and Ford, I am no more than a little chick.”

— Akira Kurosawa

35. “It seems I come from a line that is overly emotional and deficient in reason. People have often praised us as sensitive and generous, but we appear to me to have a measure of sentimentality and absurdity in our blood.”

— Akira Kurosawa

36. “They lived their lives as if their sights were set on the clouds beyond the hill they were climbing.”

— Akira Kurosawa

37. “Anyone can criticize. But no ordinary talent can justify his criticism with concrete suggestions that really improve something.”

— Akira Kurosawa

38. “It’s a mistake to decree that a year’s progress must take place within exactly one year, no more and no less.”

— Akira Kurosawa

39. “You don’t need what you don’t need. Yet human nature wants to place value on things in direct proportion to the amount of labor that went into making them.”

— Akira Kurosawa

40. “I had been ready to reproach her for the indignities she had caused me to suffer in the past, but suddenly I was moved by this figure of an old woman I no longer recognized, and all I could do was stare vacantly down at her.”

— Akira Kurosawa

41. “There are sometimes such human beings among film critics – the things they say they see are so far off the beam that you would think they were possessed by some kind of demon. I suppose nothing can be done about critics, but we can’t have such people among film directors.”

— Akira Kurosawa

42. “But now, as I recall my past works in order to write about them, the people from the past whom I had at last forgotten come to life again in my head, clamoring for attention, each one asserting his own individuality. I am at a loss. Each one is to me like a child of my own that I gave birth to and raised.”

— Akira Kurosawa

43. “As I remember it, the fog-like substance that clouded my brain finally vanished as if blown away by the wind.”

— Akira Kurosawa

44. “In other words, take “myself,” subtract “movies” and the result is “zero.”

— Akira Kurosawa

45. “This little story has its charm and doesn’t really hurt anyone. What is frightening is the ability of fear to drive people off the course of human behavior.”

— Akira Kurosawa

46. “Within each film I have become one with many different kinds of people, and I have lived their lives. For this reason, in order to prepare for the making of a new film, it requires a tremendous effort to forget the people in the film that went before.”

— Akira Kurosawa

47. “People who can’t make the simple distinction between what tastes good or bad have disqualified themselves from the human race,” was one of his pet theories.”

— Akira Kurosawa