War & Peace Quote by Martin Scorsese

It sounds like a compliment, but it lands as a studied, almost suspicious concession: “I do know that some Buddhists are able to attain peace of mind.” Scorsese doesn’t say Buddhists attain peace of mind; he says some Buddhists, and he frames it as knowledge he’s acquired, as if calm were an exotic skill observed at a distance. The sentence is padded with qualifiers that expose the real subject: not Buddhism, but a man circling the idea of serenity without fully granting it credibility as a human baseline.

That hedging matters in Scorsese’s universe. His films are powered by velocity: appetites, guilt, adrenaline, Catholic moral accounting. Peace is rarely a default state; it’s a rumor. So the line reads less like spiritual curiosity and more like a director confessing his own temperament - restless, disciplined, drawn to ritual, yet skeptical that the ritual can ever quiet the engine. “Able to attain” makes tranquility sound like a technical achievement, akin to mastering craft or controlling a chaotic set. It’s admiration filtered through pragmatism.

The context also points to Scorsese’s long engagement with faith on screen - from the bruised theology of Mean Streets and Raging Bull to the explicitly devotional projects he’s pursued later. In that light, Buddhism becomes a foil to his inherited Catholic drama: a tradition associated (in Western shorthand) with detachment, meditation, and release. The subtext is envy with guardrails. He’s allowing the possibility of peace, but keeping it safely conditional, as though certainty would feel like surrender.