Best 31 quotes of Pier Paolo Pasolini on MyQuotes

An artist, if he's unselfish and passionate, is always a living protest. Just to open his mouth is to protest: against conformism, against what is official, public, or national, what everyone else feels comfortable with, so the moment he opens his mouth, an artist is engaged, because opening his mouth is always scandalous.

And dead an epoch of our existence, which in a world destined to humiliate us was moral light and resistance.

Death does determine life. Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. However, to be sincere I must add that for me death is important only if it is not justified and rationalized by reason. For me death is the maximum of epicness and death.

Death does determine life.

Football is the last sacred ritual of our time.

I am not interested in deconsecrating: this is a fashion I hate, it is petit-bourgeois. I want to reconsecrate things as much as possible, I want to re-mythicize them.

I don't believe we shall ever again have any form of society in which men will be free. One should not hope for it. One should not hope for anything. Hope is invented by politicians to keep the electorate happy.

If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.

In the end, oh I know, never, in my haggard passion, have I ever been such a cadaver as now as I take again in hand my tables of the present— if reality's real, but after it's been destroyed in the eternal and the moment by the obsessive idea of a shining nothingness.

It has been said that I have three heroes: Christ, Marx and Freud. This is reducing everything to formulae. In truth, my only hero is Reality. If I have chosen to be a filmmaker as well as a writer it is because, rather than expressing reality through those symbols that are words, I have preferred the cinema as a means of expression - to express reality through reality.

I think to scandalize is a right, to be scandalized is a pleasure, and those who refuse to be scandalized are moralists.

Nothing remains but to hope the end will come to extinguish the unrelenting pain of waiting for it.

Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.

The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality.

The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.

The power of consumer goods . . . has been engendered by the so-called liberal and progressive demands of freedom, and, by appropriating them, has emptied them of their meaning, and changed their nature.

The sexual freedom of today for most people is really only a convention, an obligation, a social duty, a social anxiety, a necessary feature of the consumer's way of life.

When I make a film I'm always in reality among the trees, and among the people like yourselves. There's no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality as there is in literature. The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality.

When the soul hears no other calls than those of the sweet chaos of daily good and evil.

Behold those times re-created by the brutal power of sunlit images, the light of life’s tragedy. The walls of the trial, the field of the firing squad; and the distant ghost of Rome’s suburbs in a ring, gleaming white in naked light. Gunshots: our death, our survival.

Da una parte il cielo era tutto schiarito, e vi brillavano certe stellucce umide, sperdute nella sua grandezza, come in una sconfinata parete di metallo, da dove, sulla terra, venisse a cadere qualche misero soffio di vento.

Era come una mano di colore data sul venticello, sui muri gialletti della borgata, sui prati, sui carretti, sugli autobus coi grappoli agli sportelli. Una mano di colore ch'era tutta l'allegria e la miseria delle notti dell'estate del presente e del passato.

Every day my anxiety is higher, every day the grief more mortal. Today more than yesterday terror exalts me…

Forse è scoppiata, la Bomba, fuori dalla mia coscienza. Anzi, è così certamente. E la fine del Mondo è già accaduta: una cosa muta, calata nel controluce del crepuscolo. Ombra, chi opera in questa èra. Ah, sacro Novecento, regione dell’anima in cui l’Apocalisse è un vecchio evento!

For to a boy it can seem that he shall never have what he alone has never had.

I, too, head for the Baths of Caracalla, thinking—with my old, magnificent privilege of thinking… (And let there still be a god in me that thinks, lost, weak, and childish, yet whose voice is so human it is almost a song.) Oh, to leave this prison of poverty! To be free of the yearning that makes these ancient nights so splendid! He who knows yearning, and he who does not, have something in common: man’s desires are humble.

It’s not Love. But what fault is it of mine if my affections do not become Love? Very much my fault, I would say, when I can live from day to day on mad purity, blind pity… Make a scandal of meekness. But the violence of the senses and intellect that has confounded me for years was the only way.

Sopra i tetti delle case si vedevano striscioni di nubi, sfregati e pestati dal vento, che, lassù, doveva soffiare libero come aveva soffiato al principio del mondo.

The birds sang in the dust in an elaborate weave, ambiguous, deafening, prey to existence poor passions lost between the modest summits of groves of mulberry and elder; and I, like them, in secluded places reserved for the lost and pure, would wait for evening to fall, for the silent smells of fire and joyous misery to fill the air, for the Angelus bell to toll, veiled in the new peasant mystery fulfilled in the ancient mystery.

The fury of confession, at first, then the fury of clarity: It was from you, Death, that such hypocritical obscure feeling was born! And now let them accuse me of every passion, let them bad-mouth me, let them say I’m deformed, impure, obsessed, a dilettante, a perjurer. You isolate me, you give me the certainty of life, I’m on the stake. I play the card of fire and I win this little, immense goodness of mine. I can do it, for I have suffered you too much! I return to you as an émigré returns to his own country and rediscovers it: I made a fortune (in the intellect) and I’m happy, as I once was, destitute of any norm, a black rage of poetry in my breast. A crazy old-age youth. Once your joy was confused with terror, it’s true, and now almost with other joy, livid and arid, my passion deluded. Now you really frighten me, for you are truly close to me, part of my angry state, of obscure hunger, of the anxiety almost of a new being.

We survive, in the confusion of a life reborn beyond reason.