Andrei Tarkovsky

I got an email from my good friend M with some quotes from Andrei Tarkovsky, a Russian born film maker. Some of them were such that I identified with them instantly. It is at moments like this that when you are able to identify with the thoughts of a Russian Film maker or a Columbian writer or a Japanese Businessman that you could believe there is a universal human language, and that is the language of ideas and inspiration.

I thought I should share these quotes without having to forward the mail :D

Or I would risk this or this.

Ok, fine, that was not so relevant to this kind of mail, but who am I to say, one man's food is another's poison.


Anyways, here are the quotes

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



It is so much easier to slip down than it is to rise one iota above your own narrow, opportunist motives. A true spiritual birth is extraordinarily hard to achieve.



...nobody wants, or can bring himself, to look soberly into himself and accept that he is accountable for his own life and his own soul. The connection between man's behaviour and his destiny has been destroyed; and this tragic breach is the cause of his sense of instability in the modern world...[man] has arrived at the false and deadly assumption that he has no part to play in shaping his own fate.



There is nothing more beautiful and mysterious than simplicity.



Artistic creation is by definition a denial of death. Therefore it is optimistic, even if in an ultimate sense the artist is tragic. And so there can never be optimistic artists and pessimistic artists. There can only be talent and mediocrity.



Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.