Top 300 Roger Ebert Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.”

— Roger Ebert

2. “We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls. They allow us to enter other minds, not simply in the sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it.”

— Roger Ebert

3. “To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

— Roger Ebert

4. “We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls.”

— Roger Ebert

5. “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.”

— Roger Ebert

6. “Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people.”

— Roger Ebert

7. “Life’s missed opportunities, at the end, may seem more poignant to us than those we embraced – because in our imagination they have a perfection that reality can never rival.”

— Roger Ebert

8. “Just write, get better, keep writing, keep getting better. It’s the only thing you can control.”

— Roger Ebert

9. “The Muse visits during the process of creation, not before.”

— Roger Ebert

10. “I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try.”

— Roger Ebert

11. “Open-heart surgery is now part of a typical life experience for many people. Folks talk casually about ‘having a stent put in,’ as if they had their tires rotated.”

— Roger Ebert

12. “One of the gifts one movie lover can give another is the title of a wonderful film they have not yet discovered.”

— Roger Ebert

13. “We are born into a box of time and space. We use words and communication to break out of it and to reach out to others.”

— Roger Ebert

14. “In the world of bad movies, ‘Death to Smoochy’ is a towering achievement.”

— Roger Ebert

15. “Teaching prejudice to a child is itself a form of bullying. You’ve got to be taught to hate.”

— Roger Ebert

16. “Sometimes two people will regard each other over a gulf too wide to ever be bridged, and know immediately what could have happened, and that it never will.”

— Roger Ebert

17. “I have been here before, I am here now, I will be here again.”

— Roger Ebert

18. “Socrates told us, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” I think he’s calling for curiosity, more than knowledge. In every human society at all times and at all levels, the curious are at the leading edge.”

— Roger Ebert

19. “I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am still awake at night, asking how? I am more content with the question than I would be with an answer.”

— Roger Ebert

20. “And yet, even so, there is a way to find happiness. That is to be curious about all of the interlocking events that add up to our lives. To notice connections. To be amused or perhaps frightened by the ways things work out. If the universe is indifferent, what a consolation that we are not.”

— Roger Ebert

21. “Art is the closest we can come to understanding how a stranger really feels.”

— Roger Ebert

22. “No movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.”

— Roger Ebert

23. “It is reckless to make broad generalizations about any group of people.”

— Roger Ebert

24. “I do not fear death. I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear.”

— Roger Ebert

25. “Low self esteem involves imagining the worst that other people can think about you.”

— Roger Ebert

26. “Nothing could be more boring than an absolutely accurate movie about the law.”

— Roger Ebert

27. “The problem with being sure that God is on your side is that you can’t change your mind, because God sure isn’t going to change His.”

— Roger Ebert

28. “A film like Hoop Dreams is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and makes us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself.”

— Roger Ebert

29. “Some of these people make my skin crawl.”

— Roger Ebert

30. “I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.”

— Roger Ebert

31. “Most people choose movies that provide exactly what they expect, and tell them things they already know. Others are more curious. We are put on this planet only once, and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our minds.”

— Roger Ebert

32. “Film theory has nothing to do with film.”

— Roger Ebert

33. “Every great film should seem new every time you see it.”

— Roger Ebert

34. “Life always has an unhappy ending, but you can have a lot of fun along the way, and everything doesn’t have to be dripping in deep significance.”

— Roger Ebert

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35. “There are no guarantees. But there is also nothing to fear. We come from oblivion when we are born. We return to oblivion when we die. The astonishing thing is this period of in-between.”

— Roger Ebert

36. “Aren’t you getting tired of people hating one another? What do they think they get out of it?”

— Roger Ebert

37. “No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.”

— Roger Ebert

38. “What I believe is that all clear-minded people should remain two things throughout their lifetimes: Curious and teachable.”

— Roger Ebert

39. “I wear a pedometer, a little device that counts every step. It works as a goad, because you walk additional distances to pile up the numbers. The average person walks 2,000 to 3,000 steps a day. I walk 10,000 steps a day. I have lost a lot of weight as a result.”

— Roger Ebert

40. “Never marry anyone you could not sit next to during a three-day bus trip.”

— Roger Ebert

41. “My motto: ‘No good movie is depressing. All bad movies are depressing.’”

— Roger Ebert

42. “In literature, it’s called plagiarism. In the movies, it’s homage.”

— Roger Ebert

43. “If your religion doesn’t respect the rights of other religions, it is lacking something.”

— Roger Ebert

44. “In Hollywood, ‘under development’ means ‘all I have is the title.’”

— Roger Ebert

45. “Films like Fargo are why I love the movies.”

— Roger Ebert

46. “Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.”

— Roger Ebert

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47. “It is quite possible for the vulgar to be funny, but to succeed, it must rise to a certain genius.”

— Roger Ebert

48. “I lost faith in the Oscars the first year I was a movie critic – the year that Bonnie and Clyde didn’t win.”

— Roger Ebert

49. “Improvisation is a weird word because we often think it means that you make things up out of whole cloth right there on the spot, and that’s rarely the case in acting. You have to know who the character is, what the situation is and what is needed.”

— Roger Ebert

50. “It’s hard to explain the fun to be found in seeing the right kind of bad movie.”

— Roger Ebert

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