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Top Tom Stoppard Quotes

Browse top 132 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Tom Stoppard.

Favorite Tom Stoppard Quotes

1. "A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself." ~ Tom Stoppard
2. "Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final." ~ Tom Stoppard
3. "Age is a very high price to pay for maturity." ~ Tom Stoppard
4. "Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them." ~ Tom Stoppard
5. "My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers." ~ Tom Stoppard
6. "Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it." ~ Tom Stoppard
7. "It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God." ~ Tom Stoppard
8. "When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?" ~ Tom Stoppard
9. "Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little." ~ Tom Stoppard
10. "I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus." ~ Tom Stoppard
11. "I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself." ~ Tom Stoppard
12. "Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering." ~ Tom Stoppard
13. "ROS: Why don't you go and have a look?GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?" ~ Tom Stoppard
14. "Now for a handful of guilders I happen to have a private and uncut performance of the rape of the Sabine Women - or rather woman, or rather Alfred -Get your skirt on Alfred!" ~ Tom Stoppard
15. "I got dizzy," he explained.I should think you did. What were you doing?'Nothing," said Moon. "I was trying to face one way or the other and I got confused and fell over."Let that be my epitaph." ~ Tom Stoppard
16. "SEPTIMUS: My lady, I was alone with my thoughts in the gazebo, when Mrs Chater ran me to ground, and I being in such a passion, in an agony of unrelieved desire --LADY CROOM: Oh....!SEPTIMUS: -- I thought in my madness that the Chater with her skirts over her head would give me the momentary illusion of the happiness to which I dared not put a face.(Pause.)LADY CROOM: I do not know when I have received a more unusual compliment, Mr Hodge. I hope I am more than a match for Mrs Chater with her head in a bucket. Does she wear drawers?SEPTIMUS: She does.LADY CROOM: Yes, I have heard that drawers are being worn now. It is unnatural for women to be got up like jockeys. I cannot approve." ~ Tom Stoppard
17. "In an age when the difference between prince and peasant was thought to be in the stars, Mr Tzara, art was naturally an affirmation for the one and a consolation to the other; but we live in an age when the social order is seen to be the work of material forces and we have been given an entirely new kind of responsibility, the responsibility of changing society." ~ Tom Stoppard
18. "[Christopher:] You cannot conceive of the quantity of explosives the armies throw at each other for each man killed! The shells make a continuous noise, sometimes like an enormous machine breaking apart. At other times, they come whistling towards you in a thoughtful sort of way and then go crump and the screw cap flies off, hurtling through the air, screaming. There's a kind of shell which comes with a crescendo like an express train, only faster. Another kind which makes a noise like tearing calico, louder and louder. The largest kind are the ones which burst in the sky and make a double crack, like a wet canvas being shaken out by a giant. Such immense explosions to kill such small, weak animals." ~ Tom Stoppard
19. "I have three copies of the first edition, which sold in double figures, speaking loosely; there was a moment when Blond's 'Lord Malquist and Mr Moon' sold 67 copies, or some such number, in Venezuela - a mystery I never solved. I have never been to Venezuela. I remember going into Foyles' bookshop in 1966 and being gratified to see a stack of Malquist-and-Moons on the New Fiction table. I counted them; there were twelve. A week or two later I went in again; there they were. I counted them again; there were thirteen! I saw at once what was happening. People were leaving my book at bookshops." ~ Tom Stoppard
20. "Inside where nothing shows, I am the essence of a man spinning double-headed coins, and betting against himself in private atonement for an unremembered past." ~ Tom Stoppard
21. "We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style." ~ Tom Stoppard
22. "It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst." ~ Tom Stoppard
23. "The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks." ~ Tom Stoppard
24. "We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?" ~ Tom Stoppard
25. "Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure. Fermat's last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y and z are whole numbers each raised to power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2." ~ Tom Stoppard
26. "Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction!Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family." ~ Tom Stoppard
27. "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." ~ Tom Stoppard
28. "Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God." ~ Tom Stoppard
29. "I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle skepticism." ~ Tom Stoppard
30. "Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead." ~ Tom Stoppard
31. "Pirates could happen to anyone." ~ Tom Stoppard
32. "It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them." ~ Tom Stoppard
33. "Your opinions are your symptoms." ~ Tom Stoppard
34. "The days of the digital watch are numbered." ~ Tom Stoppard
35. "If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice." ~ Tom Stoppard
36. "A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma." ~ Tom Stoppard
37. "Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe." ~ Tom Stoppard
38. "I should have the courage of my lack of convictions." ~ Tom Stoppard
39. "Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light." ~ Tom Stoppard
40. "the natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. strangely enough it all works out in the end... it's a mystery." ~ Tom Stoppard
41. "You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad." ~ Tom Stoppard
42. "What we're trying to do is write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might … travel … ([He] picks up the script.) Now, what we've got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball would travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting ‘Ouch!' with your hands stuck into your armpits. (indicating the cricket bat) This isn't better because someone says it's better, or because there's a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lords. It's better because it's better." ~ Tom Stoppard
43. "We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?" ~ Tom Stoppard
44. "Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!" ~ Tom Stoppard
45. "HANNAH: ....English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the Grand Tour. Here, look -- Capability Brown doing Claude, who was doing Virgil. Arcadia! And here, superimposed by Richard Noakes, untamed nature in the style of Salvator Rosa. It's the Gothic novel expressed in landscape. Everything but vampires." ~ Tom Stoppard
46. "HANNAH: Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric, they used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It's not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard's indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television." ~ Tom Stoppard
47. "To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea." ~ Tom Stoppard
48. "The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists." ~ Tom Stoppard
49. "The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me." ~ Tom Stoppard
50. "Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?" ~ Tom Stoppard
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Today's Quote

If she can't spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell."
Author: Beverly Cleary

What Did Tom Stoppard Talk About?

Thin
Here
Con
Hen
Wit
Lit
Thou
Self
Ear
King
Bee
Act
Los
Sin
Per
Hey
Mean
Tan
Use
Able
Pen
Ought
Does
Lie
Ring
End
Son
Again
Yes
Die
Happen
She
Less
Though
Sure
Rent
Fact
Might
Order
Sing
Ours
Hang
Each
Cat
Edge
Old
Once
Star
Mad
Hole

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