Tom Stoppard Quotes

154 Sourced Quotes

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

Tom Stoppard
Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?

Tom Stoppard
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering; the capacity for self-indulgence changes hands.

Tom Stoppard
The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

Tom Stoppard
It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

Tom Stoppard
We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.

Tom Stoppard
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty — and, by which definition, a philosopher — dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher.

Tom Stoppard
Language is a finite instrument crudely applied to an infinity of ideas, and one consequence of the failure to take account of this is that modern philosophy has made itself ridiculous by analysing such statements as, "This is a good bacon sandwich," or, "Bedser had a good wicket."

Tom Stoppard
Buddy Holly was twenty-two. Think of what he might have gone on to achieve. 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.

Tom Stoppard
Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.

Tom Stoppard
And for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute...

Tom Stoppard
When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.

Tom Stoppard
In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.

Tom Stoppard
You talked animatedly for some time about language being the aniseed trail that draws the hounds of heaven when the metaphysical fox has gone to earth; he must have thought you were barmy.

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
Michael: "March here, march there, present arms, where's your cap?" — you've no idea, the whole Army's obsessed with playing at soldiers.

Tom Stoppard
A lady, if surprised by melancholy, might go to bed with a chap, once; or a thousand times if consumed by passion. But twice…twice…A lady might think she'd been taken for a tart.

Tom Stoppard
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
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.

Tom Stoppard
A character on how he chose his university course:
Almost everyone who didn't know what to do, did philosophy. Well, that's logical.

Tom Stoppard
The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to be in that part of the plan.

Tom Stoppard
Biography is the mesh through which our real life escapes.

Tom Stoppard
Bennett seems to be showing alarming signs of irony. I have always found that irony among the lower orders is the first sign of an awakening social consciousness. It remains to be seen whether it will grow into an armed seizure of the means of production, distribution and exchange, or spend itself in liberal journalism.

Tom Stoppard
The kind of person who embarks on an endless leap-frog down to the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.
On himself

Tom Stoppard
An essentially private man [James Joyce] who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.

Tom Stoppard
Turgenev: The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.

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.
A cricket enthusiast on baseball

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

Tom Stoppard
The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.

Tom Stoppard
Tzara: Causality is no longer fashionable owing to the war.
Carr: How illogical, since the war itself had causes. I forget what they were, but it was all in the papers at the time. Something about brave little Belgium, wasn't it?
Tzara: Was it? I thought it was Serbia...
Carr: Brave little Serbia...? No, I don't think so. The newspapers would never have risked calling the British public to arms without a proper regard for succinct alliteration.

Tom Stoppard