5 Ingmar Bergman Quotes on Belief

Ingmar Bergman quotes on belief

18. I hope I never get so old I get religious.

30. To the fanatical believer physical and spiritual suffering is beside the point, compared with salvation. That is why, to him, everything happening around him is irrelevant, a mirror-image, a mere will-o'-the-wisp. ... I can really never get shot of them, the fanatics. Whether they appear as religious fanatics or vegetarian fanatics makes no odds. They're catastrophic people. These types whose whole cast of mind as it were looks beyond mere human beings toward some unknown goal. The terrible thing is the great power they often wield over their fellow human beings. Apart from the fact that I believe they suffer like the very devil, I've no sympathy for them.

34. No one is safe from religious ideas and confessional phenomena. Neither you nor I. We can fall victim to them when we least expect it. It's like Mao flu, or being struck by lightning. You're utterly helpless. Exposed. As I see it today, any relapse is utterly out of the question. But I can't say it's out of the question tomorrow.

39. People think there's a solution... If everything is distributed in the proper quarters, put into the right pigeonholes, everything will be fine. But I'm not so sure. ... Nothing, absolutely nothing at all has emerged out of all these ideas of faith and scepticism, all these convulsions, these puffings and blowings. For many of my fellow human beings on the other hand, I'm aware that these problems still exist - and exist as a terrible reality. I hope this generation will be the last to live under the scourge of religious anxiety.

40. If you have a faith, if you've some deep conviction, whether you're a Nazi or a Communist or what the hell else you are - then you can sacrifice yourself and others to your faith. But from the moment you've no faith - from that moment you live in a deep inner confusion - from then on you're exposed to what Strindberg calls 'the powers'.