Ingmar Bergman Quotes

Happiness does not exist as an isolated quality, nor does it conform to a single fixed pattern. Happiness is something that breathes and lives in the relationships between one person and another.

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

Whereas the Bedouin who survey 100 miles of empty sand and crave company and can psychologically afford to offer each stranger a warm welcome, his urban contemporaries, at heart no less well-meaning or generous, must in order to preserve a modicum of balance, live without any acknowledgement of the millions of human beings sleeping arguing. Copulating, and dying only inches away. Modern society does not help us to put forward our more dignified side.

In a non-supernatural universe, there's just character, and it's humanity and human beings and how they relate to each other.

I tend to be drawn more to people than pure story ideas.

Our interactions with one another reflect a dance between love and fear.

Business, after all, is nothing more than a bunch of human relationships.

There are some persons we could not cut down to size without diminishing ourselves as well.

We are only peripherally tied to the lives of others. It takes a long long time for us to become deeply involved with others, and for some this never happens.

When I think about [characters], I like to think of them in their relationships to each other. In the same way, I think that's how humans are ultimately defined. We are our relationships to one another. And a lot of what's interesting about us happens in the context of other people.

I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

There isn't a story written that isn't about blood and money. People and their relationship to each other is the blood, the family. And how they live, the money of it.

I play around with human things, human relationships and that, and allow that kind of talk to work in that way, on that level.

Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame, who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off.

Somehow I had come to believe that because a person is in need, they are candidates for sympathy, not just charity. It was not that I wanted to buy her groceries, the government was already doing that. I wanted to buy her dignity. And yet, by judging her, I was the one taking her dignity away.

All people deserve to be treated with dignity and have their human rights respected, no matter who they are or whom they love.

No civilized society can thrive upon victims, whose humanity has been permanently mutilated.

The most important part about tomorrow is not the technology or the automation, but that man is going to come into entirely new relationships with his fellow men. He will retain much more in his everyday life of what we term the naïveté and idealism of the child. I think the way to see what tomorrow is going to look like is just to look at our children.

Most people are participating in the grand adventure of living with one another.

[The career a young man should choose should be] one that is most consonant with our dignity, one that is based on ideas of whose truth we are wholly convinced, one that offers us largest scope in working for humanity and approaching that general goal towards which each profession offers only one of the means: the goal of perfection ... If he works only for himself he can become a famous scholar, a great sage, an excellent imaginative writer [ Dichter ], but never a perfected, a truly great man.

Part of what makes us human is what we mean to other people, and what people mean to us.

The moment man cuts himself off from living connection with the human race and its needs, he begins to die from poor circulation.

There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals.

They're sort of ancillary anyway, friends. I mean, they're important -- everybody knows that; the TV tells you so -- but they come and go. You lose one friend, you pick up another.