Do people really want liberty, equality, fraternity? Is it not some manner of speaking?

For me optimism is two lovers walking into the sunset arm in arm. Or maybe into the sunrise - whatever appeals to you.

I believe the life of every person is worthy of scrutiny, containing its own secrets and dramas.

I have one good characteristic: I'm a pessimist, so I always imagine the worst - always. To me, the future is a black hole.

Maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.

There are mysteries, secret zones in each individual.

In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.

This man (Bergman) is one of the few film directors-perhaps the only one in the world-to have said as much about human nature as Dostoevsky or Camus.

I like chance meetings - life is full of them. Every day, without realising it, I pass people whom I should know.

The realm of superstitions, fortune-telling, presentiments, intuition, dreams, all this is the inner life of a human being, and all this is the hardest thing to film.

(When asked what a director does) I help.

If you escape from a necessary fight, pray you will live long enough to wait for and deal with the same challenge that must be settled.

It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind's dignity.

Assuredly it would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like rhetoric and the arts, a habit.

I had lived in fear of the fabled terrifying visions that assail chronic drinkers, but which had not yet attacked me.

I don't think it would be a good idea for scientists to have more political power. Scientists as a group are more inclined to try to derive an ought from an is, than the population at large.

When I left school, I wanted to be an artist, specifically a painter.

There is no government in Europe where ministers go through that kind of confirmation process, which in fact is modeled on the way the U.S. cabinet members are confirmed.

The President of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day.

We fail when we try to give simple answers to complicated problems.

Truth may sometimes hurt, but delusion harms.