Authors
Tom Stoppard Quotes
Best Quotes by Tom Stoppard (Top 10)
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We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.
Tom Stoppard -
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 -
We're actors. We're the opposite of people.
Tom Stoppard -
Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.
Tom Stoppard -
Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?
Tom Stoppard -
Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
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Pirates could happen to anyone.
Tom Stoppard -
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Tom Stoppard -
We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.
Tom Stoppard -
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.
Tom Stoppard
More Tom Stoppard Quotes
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Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
Tom Stoppard -
The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry aboutcloudsdaffodilswaterfallswhat happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes inthese things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.
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A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
Tom Stoppard -
What a fine persecutionto be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.
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Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
Tom Stoppard -
It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
Tom Stoppard -
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.
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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.
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James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.
Tom Stoppard -
Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.
Tom Stoppard -
If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.
Tom Stoppard -
Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes not sound...
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It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
Tom Stoppard -
Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.
Tom Stoppard -
The bad end unhappily; the good, unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
Tom Stoppard -
Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.
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I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
Tom Stoppard -
I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.
Tom Stoppard -
The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.
Tom Stoppard -
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
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I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it.
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Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect.
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The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
Tom Stoppard -
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
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If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.
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Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.
Tom Stoppard -
It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.
Tom Stoppard -
The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.
Tom Stoppard -
We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.
Tom Stoppard -
From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
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If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
Tom Stoppard -
Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.
Tom Stoppard -
I don't think I can be expected to take seriously any game which takes less than three days to reach its conclusion.
Tom Stoppard