Top 40 Robert Bresson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Cinematography is a writing with images in mouvement and with sounds.”

— Robert Bresson

2. “Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle.”

— Robert Bresson

Featured in: Filmmaking Quotes

3. “The future of cinematography belongs to a new race of young solitaries who will shoot films by putting their last penny into it and not let themselves be taken in by the material routines of the trade.”

— Robert Bresson

4. “Unbalance so as to re-balance.”

— Robert Bresson

5. “An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.”

— Robert Bresson

6. “Cinema, radio, television, and magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen without hearing.”

— Robert Bresson

7. “When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes more towards the within, the eye towards the outer.”

— Robert Bresson

8. “Be the first to see what you see as you see it.”

— Robert Bresson

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

9. “The point is not to direct someone, but to direct oneself.”

— Robert Bresson

10. “Catch instants. Spontaneity, freshness.”

— Robert Bresson

11. “Traduire le vent invisible par l’eau qu’il sculpte en passant.”

— Robert Bresson

12. “My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.”

— Robert Bresson

13. “Let nothing be changed and all be different.”

— Robert Bresson

14. “A film is born in my head and I kill it on paper. It is brought back to life by the actors and then killed in the camera. It is then resurrected into a third and final life in the editing room where the dismembered pieces are assembled into their finished form.”

— Robert Bresson

15. “In the NUDE, all that is not beautiful is obscene.”

— Robert Bresson

16. “Ideally, nothing should be shown, but that’s impossible.”

— Robert Bresson

17. “Laugh at a bad reputation. Fear a good one that you could not sustain.”

— Robert Bresson

18. “I’d rather people feel a film before understanding it.”

— Robert Bresson

19. “Empty the pond to get the fish.”

— Robert Bresson

20. “Practice the precept: find without seeking.”

— Robert Bresson

21. “Ten properties of an object, according to Leonardo: light and dark, color and substance, form and position, distance and nearness, movement and stillness.”

— Robert Bresson

22. “The faculty of using my resources well diminishes when their number grows.”

— Robert Bresson

23. “Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.”

— Robert Bresson

24. “People are charming because they aren’t aware of their charm.”

— Robert Bresson

25. “Bring together things that have not yet been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.”

— Robert Bresson

26. “Master Precision. Be a precision instrument myself.”

— Robert Bresson

27. “Provoke the unexpected. Expect it.”

— Robert Bresson

28. “The true is inimitable, the false untransformable.”

— Robert Bresson

29. “Model. Two mobile eyes in a mobile head, itself on a mobile body.”

— Robert Bresson

30. “For me, film-making is combining images and sounds of real things in an order that makes them effective. What I disapprove of is photographing things that are not real. Sets and actors are not real.”

— Robert Bresson

31. “Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art’s form.”

— Robert Bresson

32. “It is in its pure form that an art hits hard.”

— Robert Bresson

33. “The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences. Power of the cinematographer who appeals to the two senses in a governable way. Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence.”

— Robert Bresson

34. “Prefer what intuition whispers in your ear to what you have done and redone ten times in your head.”

— Robert Bresson

35. “Films can only be made by by-passing the will of those who appear in them, using not what they do, but what they are.”

— Robert Bresson

36. “Hostility to art is also hostility to the new, to the unforeseen.”

— Robert Bresson

37. “The crude real will not by itself yield truth.”

— Robert Bresson

38. “The greater the success, the closer it verges on failure.”

— Robert Bresson

39. “To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.”

— Robert Bresson

40. “L’oeil superficiel, l’oreille profonde et inventive. Le sifflement d’une locomotive imprime en nous la vision de toute une gare.”

— Robert Bresson

41. “For myself, there is something which makes suicide possible – not even possible but absolutely necessary: it is the vision of the void, the feeling of void which is impossible to bear.”

— Robert Bresson

42. “Shooting. Put oneself into a state of intense ignorance and curiosity, and yet see things in advance.”

— Robert Bresson