Daily Inspiration Quote by Martin Scorsese

In Scorsese's mouth, “I also saw the Dalai Lama a few times” lands like a tossed-off aside that’s doing quiet heavy lifting. The casual “also” is the tell: it frames the Dalai Lama not as a thunderclap of spiritual revelation but as one stop among many in a life crowded with consequential encounters. That tonal choice matters because Scorsese’s public persona carries a permanent halo of big themes - guilt, grace, sin, redemption - and audiences are primed to treat any brush with a religious figure as a conversion narrative. He refuses the expected script.

The subtext is a director’s instinct for demystification. Scorsese has spent a career staging the sacred and the profane in the same frame; here, he does it in a single sentence. The Dalai Lama becomes both monumental and mundane: a world-historical symbol reduced to the human scale of “a few times,” the way you might mention running into an old colleague. That downshift reads as respect, not disrespect - a rejection of celebrity spirituality and a reminder that proximity isn’t the same thing as understanding.

Contextually, it nods to Scorsese’s long-standing fascination with faith across traditions (from Catholic iconography to Kundun’s Tibetan Buddhism), while signaling the limits of access. The line is less name-drop than boundary-setting: he can witness, he can listen, he can film, but he won’t pretend a few meetings confer authority. That restraint is its own kind of credibility.