Daniel Barenboim Quotes

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.

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

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.

Contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy.

Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.

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

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.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

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

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.'

Some people put up a peace sign with one hand. Some people put up the middle finger instead. I use two hands and put up both.

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.'

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression.

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.

That's been a huge recurring thing in growing up - allowing two things to exist in the same space even though, instinctively, they might not be designated to.

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

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.

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

They don't have to choose either/or. They can have their cake and mutilate it too.

So much of life is paradox. So much of life is neither one thing nor the other... it's both things at the same time.

Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.

When I define polarities in my work, I actually create the space between things. I point to the question I am actually interested in, without naming it.

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