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Modern mass culture, aimed at the "consumer", the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.

— Andrei Tarkovsky Sculpting in Time (1986)

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Spirituality

More quotes by Andrei Tarkovsky

Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

Sculpting in Time (1986)

We know perfectly well that neither love nor peace of mind can be bought with any currency.

Sculpting in Time (1986)

Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.

Sculpting in Time (1986)

"Man is born unto the trouble as the sparks fly upwards." In other words suffering is germane to our existence; indeed, how without it, should we be able to "fly upwards".

Sculpting in Time (1986)

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.

Sculpting in Time (1986)

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Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue:
Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what crosses it can ne'er be true.

Richard Francis Burton The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.

Mircea Eliade Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1967)

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

Thomas Jefferson

The superior man loves his soul; the inferior man loves his property.

Confucius

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Andrei Tarkovsky (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.