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Daily Inspiration Quote by Martin Scorsese

"And as I've gotten older, I've had more of a tendency to look for people who live by kindness, tolerance, compassion, a gentler way of looking at things"

About this Quote

For a director synonymous with Catholic guilt, gangster bravado, and men tumbling toward self-destruction, Scorsese’s turn toward “kindness, tolerance, compassion” lands like a quiet plot twist. The line isn’t a Hallmark pivot; it’s an artist admitting that the older he gets, the more he distrusts the adrenaline of judgment. “Look for people” is doing the real work here. He’s not claiming sainthood or announcing a newfound purity. He’s describing a survival tactic: curating proximity to gentleness because the world, and perhaps his own imagination, already supplies enough violence.

The phrasing is intentionally modest, almost conversational, but it carries the subtext of someone who has spent decades studying what happens when men worship power, pride, and grievance. In Scorsese’s filmography, cruelty is rarely random; it’s a social system, a performance, a way of belonging. This quote reads like the counter-programming he’s earned through experience: kindness as a disciplined choice, not a soft personality trait. “A tendency” suggests he’s still wrestling with the old impulses - the itch for intensity, the romance of transgression - while learning to value steadier virtues.

Context matters: late-career Scorsese has increasingly foregrounded moral injury and reckoning, from the spiritual endurance of Silence to the elegiac despair of The Irishman. The statement feels less like self-help than artistic evolution: a filmmaker recognizing that the most radical thing, after a lifetime of dramatizing sin, might be to seek out people who refuse to make a sport of it.

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APA Style (7th ed.)
Scorsese, Martin. (2026, January 17). And as I've gotten older, I've had more of a tendency to look for people who live by kindness, tolerance, compassion, a gentler way of looking at things. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/and-as-ive-gotten-older-ive-had-more-of-a-24090/

Chicago Style
Scorsese, Martin. "And as I've gotten older, I've had more of a tendency to look for people who live by kindness, tolerance, compassion, a gentler way of looking at things." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/and-as-ive-gotten-older-ive-had-more-of-a-24090/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"And as I've gotten older, I've had more of a tendency to look for people who live by kindness, tolerance, compassion, a gentler way of looking at things." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/and-as-ive-gotten-older-ive-had-more-of-a-24090/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese (born November 17, 1942) is a Director from USA.

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