Tom Stoppard Quotes - Page 2

A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.

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.

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?

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.

We can all be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin. . .if the question is, how do you make a poem by Pushkin?- or, what exactly makes one poem or painting or piece of music greater than another?- or, what is beauty?, or liberty?, or virtue?- if the question is, how should we live?. . . then, reason gives no answer or different answers. So something went wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist . . .

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.

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.

Everything has to be taken on trust truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured.

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.

For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.

A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.

A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until--"My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience... "Look, look!" recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.