Andrei Tarkovsky Quotes

If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens.

Unlike all the other art forms, film is able to seize and render the passage of time, to stop it, almost to possess it in infinity. I'd say that film is the sculpting of time.

Unspoken feelings are unforgettable.

Weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.

Art would be useless if the world were perfect.

Where am I when I'm not in reality or in my imagination?

We have forgotten to observe. Instead of observing, we do things according to patterns.

Never try to convey your idea to the audience - it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they'll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.

I think a person needs to learn from childhood to find himself alone. It means to not be bored when you’re by yourself, because a person who finds himself bored when alone –as it seems to me– is in danger.

Of course life has no point. If it had, man would not be free.

A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.

Being silent for a while is good. Words can't really express a person's emotions.

Why do people go to the cinema? What takes them into a darkened room where, for two hours, they watch the play of shadows on a sheet? The search for entertainment? The need for a kind of drug? ..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. That is the power of cinema: ‘stars’, story-lines and entertainment have nothing to do with it.

When I speak of poetry I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality. So poetry becomes a philosophy to guide a man throughout his life.

Art is born out of an ill-designed world.

Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual...

The death of childhood is the beginning of poetry.

IN ALL MY FILMS, IT SEEMED IMPORTANT TO ME TO REMIND THE AUDIENCE TO THE FACT THAT THEY ARE NOT ALONE, LOST IN AN EMPTY UNIVERSE, BUT THAT THEY ARE CONNECTED BY INNUMERABLE THREADS WITH THEIR PAST AND PRESENT, THAT THROUGH CERTAIN MYSTICAL WAYS, EVERY HUMAN BEING REALIZES THE RAPPORT WITH THE WORLD AND THE LIFE OF HUMANITY.

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses. Art only has the capacity, through shock and catharsis, to make the human soul receptive to good. It’s ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good…Art can only give food – a jolt – the occasion – for psychical experience.

Never trouble anyone else with what you can do yourself

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.

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

If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want to collect their money.

The idea of infinity cannot be expressed in words or even described, but it can be apprehended through art, which makes infinity tangible. The absolute is only attainable through faith and in the creative act.

Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.