Tom Stoppard Quotes
A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.
For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.
I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.
If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that.But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.
As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.
No one gets up after death-there is no applause-there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death.
He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about.
Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism.
Although I don't examine myself in this respect, I would say, off the top of my head, that I've come to acknowledge my Czechness more as I get older.
Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?
Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.
You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.
THOMASINA:But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!
Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.
It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.
What freedom means, is being allowed to sing in my bath as loudly as will not interfere with my neighbour's freedom to sing a different tune in his.
There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.
The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.
I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses.
Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.
People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.
Kissing girls is not like science, nor is it like sport. It is the third thing when you thought there were only two.
We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.
I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.
I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.
