“The artist exists because the world is not perfect.”
“The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”
“Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual.”
“The only thing that concerns me is the theme of the human soul, of human suffering and self-knowledge.”
“To be free, you must be so independent that your existence is an act of rebellion.”
“The goal for all art—unless it is merely a frivolous exercise—is to explain to the artist himself and to those around him what man lives for, what is the meaning of his existence.”
“A man who has no inner life is a slave to his surroundings.”
“Modern man lives isolated in a mechanical world, divorced from nature and from himself.”
“A sense of loss pervades all my films—not because I wanted to express sadness, but because for me this is the most real and human state of being.”
“Man’s task is to make everything that surrounds him an instrument of his inner struggle.”
“We have forgotten that the goal of our existence is to love, not to achieve.”
“An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn’t exist, for the artist doesn’t live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist.”
“The artist’s mission is to make people more attentive to the beauty of the world.”
“Art must transcend logic and achieve a kind of absolute simplicity and purity.”
“Realism in art has nothing to do with the photograph; it lies in the truth of the soul.”
“In the end, everything is about faith—faith in life, in love, in the possibility of meaning.”
“Time cannot be rendered in the same way as space. Time is a state: the flame in which the lives of the beings burn.”
“The more the artist limits himself, the more he frees himself.”
“The artist should be a servant, not a master. He should have a sense of duty toward his gift.”