Marcel Proust Quotes

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.'

Everything is true; only the opposite is true too; you must believe both equally or be damned.

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

In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?'

The reverse side also has a reverse side.

In contradiction and paradox, you can find truth.

In any case, I would never make a film that was only one thing. Even if it's my warmest, most romantic film, I still want it to have the more cynical view of things, showing the irony and absurdity of things that we consider normal.

Is it good or bad?" she asked Issa. The wrong question, she knew. She just couldn't help herself. "It's both, sweet girl," said Issa. "like everything.

If you have a correct statement, then the opposite of a correct statement is of course an incorrect statement, a wrong statement. But when you have a deep truth, then the opposite of a deep truth may again be a deep truth.

Most thoughts are only profiles of thoughts. They must be inverted and synthesized with their antipodes. Thus many philosophical writings become very interesting which would not have been so otherwise.

The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph.

Either is both, and Both is neither.

It's all very simple, or else it's all very complex, or perhaps it's neither, or both.

You can go into Mark Twain's material and prove anything you want. He was against war. He was for war. He was against rich people and he was for them. He was a kaleidoscope.

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

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.

Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.

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.'

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

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.