Christopher Nolan’s Inception is a cinematic masterpiece that blurs the lines between dreams and reality, weaving a thought-provoking narrative built on complex ideas and psychological depth. The film’s script is filled with unforgettable lines that explore the power of ideas, the fragility of perception, and the emotional weight of guilt and longing. Whether it’s the haunting refrain of “You’re waiting for a train,” the mind-bending mechanics of dream architecture, or the philosophical musings on inception itself—how an idea, once planted, can define or destroy a person—every dialogue exchange is meticulously crafted to immerse the audience in its layered storytelling. Inception is not just a heist film; it’s an exploration of the human subconscious, where dreams feel real until we wake up and question everything.

Quotes from the movie Inception by Christopher Nolan (2010) with Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Elliot Page.

Are you here to kill me?
I know what this is.
I’ve seen one before. Many, many years ago.
It belonged to a man I met in a half-remembered dream.
A man possessed of some radical notions.

What is the most resilient parasite?
A bacteria? A virus?
An intestinal worm?

An idea.
Resilient. Highly contagious.
Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it’s almost impossible to eradicate.
An idea that is fully formed, fully understood, that sticks.

In the dream state, your conscious defenses are lowered and that makes your thoughts vulnerable to theft.
It’s called extraction.

Mr. Saito, we can train your subconscious to defend itself from even the most skilled extractor.

I know how to search your mind and find your secrets. I know the tricks.
And I can teach them to you, so that even when you’re asleep your defense is never down.

Look, if you want my help, you’re gonna have to be completely open with me.
I need to know my way around your thoughts better than your wife better than your therapist, better than anyone.
If this is a dream, and you have a safe full of secrets I need to know what’s in that safe.

– Ah, there’s no use threatening him in a dream, right, Mal?
– That depends on what you’re threatening. Killing him would just wake him up.
But pain…. Pain is in the mind.

It’s difficult for a man of your position to keep a love nest like this secret particularly where there’s a married woman involved.

I’ve always hated this carpet.
It’s stained and frayed in such distinctive ways.
But very definitely made of wool.
Right now I’m lying on polyester.
Which means I’m not lying on my carpet, in my apartment.

– Asshole. How do you mess up the carpet?
– It wasn’t my fault.
– You’re the architect.
– I didn’t know he was gonna rub his cheek on it!

If you can steal an idea from someone’s mind why can’t you plant one there instead?

The subject’s mind can always trace the genesis of the idea.

True inspiration’s impossible to fake.

No idea is simple when you need to plant it in somebody else’s mind.

My main competitor is an old man in poor health.
His son will soon inherit control of the corporation.
I need him to decide to break up his father’s empire.

It’ll take more than the occasional stuffed animal to convince those children they still have a father.

– I’m just doing what I know. I’m doing what you taught me.
– I never taught you to be a thief.
– No, you taught me to navigate people’s minds.

It’s the chance to build cathedrals, entire cities things that never existed things that couldn’t exist in the real world.

Before I describe the job, I have to know you can do it.

– They say we only use a fraction of our brain’s true potential. Now, that’s when we’re awake.
When we’re asleep, our mind can do almost anything.
– Such as?
– Imagine you’re designing a building. You consciously create each aspect.
But sometimes, it feels like it’s almost creating itself, if you know what I mean.
– Yeah, like I’m discovering it.
– Genuine inspiration, right? Now, in a dream, our mind continuously does this.
We create and perceive our world simultaneously.
And our mind does this so well that we don’t even know it’s happening.

You create the world of the dream.
We bring the subject into that dream, and they fill it with their subconscious.

Dreams, they feel real while we’re in them, right?
It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.

You never really remember the beginning of a dream, do you?
You always wind up right in the middle of what’s going on.

In a dream, your mind functions more quickly therefore time seems to feel more slow.
Five minutes in the real world gives you an hour in the dream.

Remember, you are the dreamer. You build this world.
I am the subject. My mind populates it.

I guess I thought that the dream space would be all about the visual but it’s more about the feel of it.
My question is, what happens when you start messing with the physics of it all?

Why are they all looking at me?
Because my subconscious feels that someone else is creating this world.
The more you change things, the quicker the projections start to converge on you.

Never re-create places from your memory. Always imagine new places.

Building a dream from your memory is the easiest way to lose your grasp on what’s real and what is a dream.

– So a totem. You need a small object, potentially heavy.
Something you can have on you that no one else knows.
– Like a coin?
– No. It needs to be more unique than that. Like, this is a loaded die.

You need the simplest version of the idea in order for it to grow naturally in your subject’s mind. It’s a subtle art.

That price on my head, was that dead or alive?
Don’t remember. Let’s see if he starts shooting.

In a dream, you can cheat architecture into impossible shapes.
That lets you create closed loops, like the Penrose Steps.
The infinite staircase.

No one likes to feel someone else messing around in their mind.

They come to be woken up.
The dream has become their reality.

I’ve had ample opportunity to observe Browning and adopt his physical presence, study his mannerisms, and so on and so forth.
So now in the first layer of the dream, I can impersonate Browning.
And suggest concepts to Fischer’s conscious mind.
Then, when we take him a level deeper his own projection of Browning should feed that right back to him.
So he gives himself the idea.

You can’t build because if you know the maze, then she knows it.

How do you translate business strategy into emotion?

– We suggest breaking up his father’s company as a “screw you” to the old man.
– No, because I think positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time.

We all yearn for reconciliation, for catharsis.

“My father accepts that I want to create for myself, not follow in his footsteps.”

When we get inside his mind, we’re gonna have to work with what we find.

On the top level, we open up his relationship with his father and say, “I will not follow in my father’s footsteps.”
Then the next level down, we feed him, “I will create something for myself.”
Then, by the time we hit the bottom level, we bring out the big guns.
“My father doesn’t want me to be him.”

– Who’d wanna be stuck in a dream for 10 years?
– Depends on the dream.

– What’s a kick?
– It’s that feeling of falling you get that jolts you awake.

The trick is to synchronize a kick that can penetrate all three levels.

– On a 747, the pilot’s up top the first-class cabin’s in the nose, so no one would walk through.
– You’d have to buy out the entire cabin and the first-class flight attendant.
– I bought the airline. It seemed neater.

– In my dreams, we’re still together.
– These aren’t just dreams. These are memories. And you said never to use memories.

They’re memories that I have to change.

If I’m ever gonna see their faces again, I’ve gotta get back home.
The real world.

– Do you know what it is to be a lover? To be half of a whole?
– No.
– I’ll tell you a riddle.
You’re waiting for a train.
A train that will take you far away.
You know where you hope this train will take you but you don’t know for sure.
But it doesn’t matter.
– How can it not matter to you where that train will take you?
– Because you’ll be together.

You promised! You promised we’d be together!

Do you think you can just build a prison of memories to lock her in?
Do you really think that that’s gonna contain her?

– What happens when we die?
– We drop into limbo.
– Are you serious? Limbo?
– Unconstructed dream space.

Downwards is the only way forwards.

– I don’t know any safe.
– That doesn’t mean you don’t know the combination.

– But when you wake up, you won’t even remember that we had an arrangement.
Limbo is gonna become your reality.
You’re gonna be lost down there so long that you’re gonna become an old man.
– Filled with regret?
– Waiting to die alone.

I’ll come back.
And we’ll be young men together again.

He pulled me close.
And I could only make out one word.
“Disappointed.”

– We were working together.
We were exploring the concept of a dream within a dream.
I kept pushing things.
I wanted to go deeper and deeper. I wanted to go further.
I just didn’t understand the concept that hours could turn into years down there that we could get trapped so deep that when we wound up on the shore of our own subconscious we lost sight of what was real.
We created. We built the world for ourselves.
We did that for years.
We built our own world.
– How long were you stuck there?
– Something like 50 years.
– Jesus. How could you stand it?
– It wasn’t so bad at first, feeling like gods.
Eventually, it just became impossible for me to live like that.
– And what about for her?
– She had locked something away, something deep inside her.
A truth that she had once known, but chose to forget.
Limbo became her reality.
– What happened when you woke up? Well, to wake up from that after years, after decades to become old souls thrown back into youth like that?
– I knew something was wrong with her. She just wouldn’t admit it.
Eventually, she told me the truth.
She was possessed by an idea.
This one very simple idea that changed everything.
That our world wasn’t real.
That she needed to wake up to come back to reality that in order to get back home we had to kill ourselves.

– What about your children?
– She thought they were projections that our real children were waiting for us up there somewhere.

If you jump, you’re not gonna wake up, remember? You’re gonna die.

I’m asking you to take a leap of faith.

I’ve freed you from the guilt of choosing to leave them.
We’re going home to our real children.

Your guilt defines her. It’s what powers her.
But you are not responsible for the idea that destroyed her.
And if we are gonna succeed in this you have to forgive yourself, and you’re gonna have to confront her.

– The subject realized he was dreaming and his subconscious tore us to pieces.
– Excellent. But you learned a lot, right?

So now you’ve noticed how much time Cobb spends doing things he says never to do.

– Cobb’s drawing Fischer’s attention to the strangeness of the dream which is making his subconscious look for the dreamer.
For me. Quick, give me a kiss.
– They’re still looking at us.
– Yeah, it was worth a shot.

Accept the fact that you’re in a dream, and I’m here to protect you. Go on.

I need you to do the same thing to him that he was going to do to you.
We’ll enter his subconscious and find out what he doesn’t want you to know.

Couldn’t someone have dreamt up a goddamn beach? Huh?

No room for tourists on these jobs.

– You built all this? This is incredible.
– We built for years. Then we started in on the memories.

We both wanted to live in a house, but we loved this type of building.
In the real world, we’d have to choose, but not here.

Listen, there’s something you should know about me. About inception.
An idea is like a virus. Resilient.
Highly contagious.
And the smallest seed of an idea can grow.
It can grow to define or destroy you.
The smallest idea, such as:
“Your world is not real.”
Simple little thought that changes everything.

The reason I knew inception was possible was because I did it to her first.

I knew we needed to escape, but she wouldn’t accept it.
She had locked something away, something deep inside.
A truth that she had once known, but chose to forget.
And she couldn’t break free.
So I decided to search for it.
I went deep into the recess of her mind and found that secret place.
And I broke in and I planted an idea.
A simple little idea that would change everything.
That her world wasn’t real.
That death was the only escape.
You’re waiting for a train.
A train that’ll take you far away.
You know where you hope this train will take you but you can’t know for sure.

You’re just a shade. You’re just a shade of my real wife.
And you were the best that I could do, but I’m sorry, you’re just not good enough.

I was disappointed that you tried.

– You remember when you asked me to marry you?
– Yes.
– You said you dreamt that we’d grow old together.
– But we did.

I’ve come back for you.
To remind you of something.
Something you once knew.
That this world is not real.

– To convince me to honor our arrangement?
– To take a leap of faith, yes.
Come back so we can be young men together again.

– Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!
– How are you?
– Look what I’ve been building!
– What are you building?
– We’re building a house on the cliff!
– On the cliff? Come on, I want you to show me. Can you show me?