Top 60 Ingmar Bergman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise.”

— Ingmar Bergman

2. “Old age is like climbing a mountain. You climb from ledge to ledge. The higher you get, the more tired and breathless you become, but your views become more extensive.”

— Ingmar Bergman

3. “To shoot a film is to organize an entire universe.”

— Ingmar Bergman

4. “Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”

— Ingmar Bergman

5. “I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality.”

— Ingmar Bergman

6. “I could always live in my art but never in my life.”

— Ingmar Bergman

7. “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

8. “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

9. “I want knowledge. Not belief. Not surmise. But knowledge. I want God to put out His hand, show His face, speak to me.”

— Ingmar Bergman

10. “We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal.”

— Ingmar Bergman

11. “I make all my decisions on intuition. But then, I must know why I made that decision. 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

12. “When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying. But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It’s like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.”

— Ingmar Bergman

13. “Today we say all art is political. But I’d say all art has to do with ethics. Which after all really comes to the same thing. It’s a matter of attitudes.”

— Ingmar Bergman

14. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

15. “The theater is like a faithful wife. The film is the great adventure – the costly, exacting mistress.”

— Ingmar Bergman

16. “I feel very strongly that I’m surrounded by other realities.”

— Ingmar Bergman

17. “All of us collect fortunes when we are children. A fortune of colors, of lights, and darkness, of movement, of tensions. Some of us have the fantastic chance to go back to his fortune when grown up.”

— Ingmar Bergman

18. “I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to man has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.”

— Ingmar Bergman

19. “To feel. To trust the feeling. I long for that.”

— Ingmar Bergman

20. “I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon’s head, an angel, a devil – or perhaps a saint – out of stone.”

— Ingmar Bergman

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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...”

— Ingmar Bergman

24. “Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure...”

— Ingmar Bergman

25. “Occasionally I sense an insane wail deep down in the pit, the echo alone reaching me, striking without warning, a child weeping uninhibitedly, imprisoned forever.”

— Ingmar Bergman

26. “We make each other alive; it doesn’t make a difference if it hurts.”

— Ingmar Bergman

27. “Here, in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity.”

— Ingmar Bergman

28. “Fellini, Kurosawa, and Bunuel move in the same field as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness.”

— Ingmar Bergman

29. “A film causes me so many worries and such a lot of reactions that I have to love it in order to get over it and past it.”

— Ingmar Bergman

30. “The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny the existence of each other.”

— Ingmar Bergman

Featured in: Individuality Quotes

31. “To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure. It’s not only the artist I’m sorry for. It’s just that I know exactly where he feels most humiliated.”

— Ingmar Bergman

32. “I think I am a better ghost than I am a human being.”

— Ingmar Bergman

33. “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.”

— Ingmar Bergman

34. “Death: Do you never stop questioning? Antonius Block: No. I never stop.”

— Ingmar Bergman

35. “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, genetaring and degenerating itself.”

— Ingmar Bergman

36. “The time between midnight and dawn when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most palatable. It is the hour when the sleepless are pursued by their sharpest anxieties, when ghosts and demons hold sway. The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most children are born.”

— Ingmar Bergman

37. “I have a lot of tics and phobias. I hate to travel. I hate to go to festivals. I hate it when somebody gets close behind me. I’m scared of the darkness. I hate open doors.”

— Ingmar Bergman

38. “I hope I never get so old I get religious.”

— Ingmar Bergman

39. “One of ennui’s most terribel components is the overwhelming feeling of ennui that comes over you whenever you try to explain it.”

— Ingmar Bergman

40. “When you die, you are extinguished. From being you will be transformed to non-being. A god does not necessarily dwell among our capricious atoms.”

— Ingmar Bergman

41. “I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.”

— Ingmar Bergman

42. “Either I did away with that fear through writing, or in the course of writing, I discovered it was no longer so intrusive or threating. The bottom line is, it’s gone.”

— Ingmar Bergman

43. “Artistic license sneered through the thin fabric.”

— Ingmar Bergman

44. “This damned ranting about doom. Is that food for the minds of modern people? Do they really expect us to take them seriously?”

— Ingmar Bergman

45. “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

46. “I know, of course, that by using film we can bring in other previously unknown worlds, realities beyond reality.”

— Ingmar Bergman

47. “Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying.”

— Ingmar Bergman

48. “It’s so horrible to see your own confusion and understand it.”

— Ingmar Bergman

49. “I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot.”

— Ingmar Bergman

50. “I’d prostitute my talents if it would further my cause, steal if there was no way out, killing my friends or anyone else if it would help my art.”

— Ingmar Bergman