Jim Jarmusch Quotes

The unnatural, that too is natural.

I am not by any means a philosopher, although I have worked with some talented people in the discipline. But certain philosophical concepts deeply inform the way I think about the world. The idea of 'opposing truths at extremes' is a powerful concept that I came to appreciate in my twenties.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

You may find many contradictory statements and philosophies within my writings. However, to this I will say such is life, for life is full of contradictions.

Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

I think the phrase that resonates from 'Just One Year' is something I sort of live by: 'The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.'

What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.

The thing about Wagner is we're always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites. There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can't represent both views on stage at once.

Wagner is contrapuntal in a philosophical way as well as a musical way. What I mean by that is that every tendency has its opposite, and you see that in the man himself. He's a metaphysical hermaphrodite - he embraces hard and soft, masculine and feminine.

In contradiction and paradox, you can find truth.

As a reader and a writer, I'm happiest when apparently mutually exclusive states can somehow coexist.

It took me a long time to learn both good and bad can exist simultaneously.

We must learn to live with contradictions, because they lead to deeper and more effective understanding.

There is, to be sure, no evil without something good.

I think the world is always improving and always not improving. I think that both are simultaneously happening all the time.

I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.

There's a dark side to everything.

I guess I found it useful to realise that everything is true at once, you know? You can pull back and say, 'Everything will be fine,' but you can also be in a situation and say, 'Not everything is going to be fine.'

Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.

I don't think there are in life, pure darkness or pure light. Everyone's got a little of everything.

The world's a mean place. It's unfair, then it's fair. It's hateful, then it's loving. It's a very peculiar place on philosophical and metaphysical and religious levels.

Life is strong and fragile. It's a paradox... It's both things, like quantum physics: It's a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists all together.

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

Two seemingly incompatible conceptions can each represent an aspect of the truth ... They may serve in turn to represent the facts without ever entering into direct conflict.