Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and photographer. He is frequently cited as one of the greatest filmmakers in cinematic history. His films, which are mostly adaptations of novels or short stories, cover a wide range of genres and are noted for their realism, dark humor, unique cinematography, extensive set designs, and evocative use of music. These Stanley Kubrick quotes will motivate you.
Best Stanley Kubrick Quotes
- “However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “Never say no to an idea – you never know how that idea will ignite another idea.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “The truth of a thing is in the feel of it, not in the think of it.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
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“Either you care, or you don’t. There’s no in-between. And if you care, then go all of the way.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “Everything has already been done. every story has been told every scene has been shot. it’s our job to do it one better.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don’t want.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “If you really want to communicate something, even if it’s just an emotion or an attitude, let alone an idea, the least effective and least enjoyable way is directly. It only goes in about an inch. But if you can get people to the point where they have to think a moment what it is you’re getting at, and then discover it, the thrill of discovery goes right through the heart.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
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“The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “Be suspicious of people who have, or crave, power. Never, ever go near power. Don’t become friends with anyone who has real power. It’s dangerous.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “Man isn’t a noble savage, he’s an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved-that about sums it up. I’m interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it’s a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
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“Nothing is as dangerous as a sure thing.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “You’re an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “You have not yet learned that in this life you have to be like everyone else: the perfect mediocrity–no better, no worse. Individuality is a monster and it must be strangled in its cradle to make our friends feel comfortable.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
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“The dead know only one thing, it is better to be alive” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “The essence of dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it’s simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize or analyze it.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “Take a stress pill and think things over– HAL in 2001” ~ Stanley Kubrick
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“There’s something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale: to an observer in the Andromeda nebula, the sign of our extinction would be no more than a match flaring for a second in the heavens: and if that match does blaze in the darkness there will be none to mourn a race that used a power that could have lit a beacon in the stars to light its funeral pyre. The choice is ours.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
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“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: ‘The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover.’ This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don’t want this to happen to 2001.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “In any case, once you’re dealing on a nonverbal level, ambiguity is unavoidable. But it’s the ambiguity of all art, of a fine piece of music or a painting – you don’t need written instructions by the composer or painter accompanying such works to ‘explain’ them. “Explaining” them contributes nothing but a superficial ‘cultural’ value which has no value except for critics and teachers who have to earn a living.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
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“It’s a mistake to confuse pity with love.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “I have always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surrealistic situation and presenting it in a realistic manner. I’ve always liked fairy tales and myths, magical stories. I think they are somehow closer to the sense of reality one feels today than the equally stylized ‘realistic’ story in which a great deal of selectivity and omission has to occur in order to preserve its ‘realist’ style.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “Chess teaches you to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good and it trains you to think objectively when you’re in trouble” ~ Stanley Kubrick
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“Don’t get obsessed with not liking a movie.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “You either connect or you don’t connect. It’s not the end of the world. It’s a movie.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “The best education in film is to make one” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “I don’t think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don’t think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
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“Like the man said, can happiness buy money?” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “It’s crazy how you can get yourself in a mess sometimes and not even be able to think about it with any sense and yet not be able to think about anything else.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of filmmaking. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “I never learned anything at all in school and didn’t read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
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“There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001 but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don’t believe in any of Earth’s monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “You’re constantly changing man. But the film’s not changing. The film stays the same. That’s the beautiful aspect of it.” ~ Stanley Kubrick Quotes
- “You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
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“A film needs more than you can give it in a lifetime.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “Some people demand a five-line capsule summary. Something you’d read in a magazine. They want you to say, ‘This is the story of the duality of man and the duplicity of governments.’ I hear people try to do it — give the five-line summary — but if a film has any substance or subtlety, whatever you say is never complete, it’s usually wrong, and it’s necessarily simplistic: truth is too multifaceted to be contained in a five-line summary. If the work is good, what you say about it is usually irrelevant.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “The director’s job is to know what emotional statement he wants a character to convey in his scene or his line, and to exercise taste and judgment in helping the actor give his best possible performance.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “The first really important book I read about filmmaking was The Film Technique by Pudovkin. This was some time before I had ever touched a movie camera and it opened my eyes to cutting and montage.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “I used and abused drugs and alcohol. When I stopped doing that it became a lot clearer that life goes from inside to giving as opposed to taking and destroying.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
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“If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “The hardest thing in making a movie is to keep in the front of your consciousness your original response to the material. Because that’s going to be the thing that will make the movie. And the loss of that will break the movie.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “A satirist is someone who has a very skeptical view of human nature, but who still has the optimism to make some sort of a joke out of it. However brutal that joke might be.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “Everything has changed, but the process of telling a story has not changed. It’s like cavemen sitting around the fire; somebody’s going to tell the story. Somebody is drawing on the wall. You’re communicating. You’re trying to learn and teach at the same time. You’re your own student and you’re your own teacher, but the process is of the communicating.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
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“[Making movies] you’re not trying to capture reality, you’re trying to capture a photograph of reality.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “It’s a passion when you’re doing it for other people and you’re doing it for the people around you making the film and the people who are going to see the film, and the giving. When you start thinking about you doing it for some sort of self-gain, then I think it becomes an obsession. It becomes a negative experience.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “The world’s religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache. This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.” ~ Stanley Kubrick Quotes
- “The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
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“I haven’t had one sexual thought since the court-martial.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “Regret isn’t going to get me anywhere. It’s like being obsessed with something. It doesn’t bring you anywhere.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “From the very beginning, all of my films have divided the critics. Some have thought them wonderful, and others have found very little good to say. But subsequent critical opinion has always resulted in a very remarkable shift to the favorable. In one instance, the same critic who originally rapped the film has several years later put it on an all-time best list. But of course, the lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
- “I haven’t come across any recent new ideas in film that strike me as being particularly important and that have to do with form. I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it.” ~ Stanley Kubrick
