Pier Paolo Pasolini Quotes

Classical tragedy was the war between good and evil. We wanted evil to be defeated and good to be victorious. But the battle in modern tragedy is between good and good. And no matter which side wins, we'll still be heartbroken.

What 'Twilight Zone' did was show we all have a great capacity for good and evil.

The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

The true knowledge of good and evil arouses disturbances of the mind

I oscillate between life and death, happiness and sadness, good and evil.

I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven Was blowing on my body, felt within A correspondent breeze, that gently moved With quickening virtue, but is now become A tempest, a redundant energy, Vexing its own creation.

You are good when you are one with yourself. Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil. For a divided house is not a den of thieves; it is only a divided house. And a ship without rudder may wander aimlessly among perilous isles yet sink not to the bottom.

In a general way, the literature of the twentieth century is essentially psychological; and psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying them all on the same plane, without any discrimination of value, as though good and evil were external to them, as though the effort toward the good could be absent at any moment from the thought of any man.

The disappointed man turns his thoughts toward a state of existence where his wiser desires may be fixed with the certainty of faith; the successful man feels that the objects which he has ardently pursued fail to satisfy the cravings of an immortal spirit; the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness, that he may save his soul alive.

The battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.

Many a one commits a reprehensible action, who is at bottom an honourable man, because man seldom acts upon natural impulse, but from some secret passion of the moment which lies hidden and concealed within the narrowest folds of his heart.

Within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. When we come to see this, we take a different attitude toward individuals.

Anthony looked down at his evil clutches -- hands, he reminded himself, hands -- and grinned anew.

I want to make my own discoveries…….penetrate the evil which attracts me

The thing that interests me is the good and evil in everybody. I don't have conventional heroes in the films that I directed, because I believe there's good and evil in everybody.

People with the purest souls are capable of the greatest evils.

Feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking myself much for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself much for it, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good chap.

That which oppresses me, is it my soul trying to come out in the open, or the soul of the world knocking at my heart for entrance?

All of the films I have made, that I have chosen to make, are all about the thin line between good and evil. And also the thin line that exists in each and every one of us. That's what my films are about.

...but somehow the madness around me and the turmoil I carried within myself acted as counterweights, and I survived in the centre.

Can we really conquer chaos so easily? If that were so, I should be able to prune the pandemonium of my own soul into something neat and tidy rather than this maze of wants and needs and misgivings that has me forever feeling as if I cannot fit into the landscape of things.

There's no way to explain to a child that the line between good and evil isn't nearly as black and white as a fairy tale would lead you to believe. That an ordinary person can turn into a villain, under the right circumstances. That sometimes we dragon slayers do things we aren't proud of.

I find it most remarkable that we who are so intimately involved in the battle between good and evil are even more involved with the shades of gray in between them.

I don't think of myself as an evil monster and I hope I'm not.

I don't want to end up losing my soul.