Top 80 Andrei Tarkovsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Man has, since the Enlightenment, dealt with things he should have ignored.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

52. “A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

53. “It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

54. “I have a horror of tags and labels. I don’t understand, for instance, how people can talk about Bergman’s “symbolism”. Far from being symbolic, be seems to me, through and almost biological naturalism, to arrive at the spiritual truth about human life that is important to him.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

55. “Knowledge is truthful only if it’s based in morality.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

56. “If we succeed with something, that is only because others are in need of what e have produced. And the more success we have with something, the more people require that we express it. So it goes without saying, as a result of this we in principle never win out, others win. We always lose.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

57. “It is perfectly possible to be a professional director or a professional writer and not to be an artist: merely a sort of executor of other people’s ideas.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

58. “I have to say from the outset that not all prose can be transferred to the screen.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

59. “Why do I feel this alone? Basically, because I’ve always been alone. I’ve always been alone. And alone I’ll be. It’s about time I become aware of it and never forget it.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

60. “Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

61. “Let them laugh at their passions.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

62. “An artist cannot be partially sincere any more than art can be an approximation of beauty.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

63. “I have always liked people who can’t adapt themselves to life pragmatically.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

64. “I love your eyes, my darling friend, Their play so passionate and bright’ning, When a sudden stare up you send, And like a heaven-blown lightning, It’d take in all from end to end But there’s more that I admire: Your eyes when they’re downcast In bursts of love-inspired fire And through the eyelash goes fast A somber, dull call of desire...”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

65. “He, who doesn’t know why he lives, cannot feel love for people or for life itself. I don’t love myself enough, so I don’t love people enough. One of my major defects is impatience: I try to get rid of it, but i can’t. I am not tolerant enough for my age. I suffer for this, because i can’t approach people with sympathy. They annoy me.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

66. “The image in cinema is based on the ability to present as an observation one’s own perception of an object.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

67. “I am becoming more and more convinced that there is something wrong with the way I live. Something false about everything I do. Even when I want to do something good; I feel that it’s only in order to seem a better person.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

68. “In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

69. “All that I wanted was to tempt into life things that wanted to come out of me.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

70. “I feel restricted, my soul is restricted inside me, I need another living space.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

71. “But how can I put a name to what it is that I want? How am I to know that I really don’t want what I want, or that I really don’t want what I don’t want? These are intangibles that the moment you name them their meaning evaporates like jellyfish in the sun.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

72. “I believe in one thing: the human spirit is immortal and indestructible. In the beyond there could be anything, it is of no importance whatsoever. What we call death is not death. It’s a rebirth. A caterpillar becomes a cocoon. I think there is a life after death and it is that that is unnerving. It would be so much simpler to conceive of oneself as a telephone cord that is unplugged. Then you could live any way that you wanted. God would have no importance of any kind.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

73. “What moved me was the theme of the harmony which is born only of sacrifice, the twofold experience of love. It’s not a question of mutual love: what nobody seems to understand is that love can only be one-sided, that no other love exists, that in any other form it is not love. If it involves less than total giving, it is not love. It is impotent; for the moment, it is nothing.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

74. “No other art can compare with cinema in the force, precision, and starkness with which it conveys awareness of facts and aesthetic structures existing and changing within time.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

75. “For many years I have been tormented by the certainty that the most extraordinary discoveries await us in the sphere of time. We know less about time than about anything else.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

76. “A child doesn’t have to be a prodigy. The only thing that matters is that he should’t become ‘stuck’ in childishness.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

77. “We all either underestimate each other, or else exaggerate each other’s virtues. Very few people are capable of assessing others as they deserve. It is a particular gift. In fact I would even say that only the great are capable of it.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

78. “One doesn’t need a lot to be able to live. The great thing is to be free in your work. Ofcourse it’s important to print or exhibit, but if that’s not possible you are still left with the most important thing of all – being able to work without asking anybody’s permission.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

79. “Cinema is a very difficult and serious art, it requires sacrificing of yourself. You should belong to it, it shouldn’t belong to you. Cinema uses your life, not vice versa.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

80. “In the case of someone who is spiritual receptive, it is possible to talk of an analogy between the impact made by a work of art and that of a purely religious experience. Arts acts above all on the soul shaping its spiritual structure.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

81. “If two people have been able to experience the same thing even once, they will be able to understand each other.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

82. “I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience – and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

83. “It is obvious to everyone that man’s material aggrandisement has not been synchronous with spiritual progress. The point has been reached where we seem to have a fatal incapacity for mastering our material achievements in order to use them for our own good. We have created a civilisation which threatens to annihilate mankind.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

84. “Music miraculously penetrates your very soul.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

85. “Masterpieces, not always distinguished or distinguishable among all the works with pretensions to genius, are scattered about the world like warning notices in a mine field.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

86. “The only function of consciousness is to produce fabrications. True knowledge is achieved in the heart and in the soul.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky