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Tom Stoppard Quotes
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.
Tom Stoppard
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And for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute...
Tom Stoppard
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Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.
Tom Stoppard
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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.
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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
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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
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If there is any point in using language at all it is that a word is taken to stand for a particular fact or idea and not for other facts or ideas.
Tom Stoppard
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Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers... Today England looked like a nation of goalkeepers.
Tom Stoppard
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Nature manipulates the x and turns it into y. Then y goldfish is your starting population for the following year... Your value for y becomes your next value for x. The question is what is being done to x? What is the manipulation? Whatever it is, it can be written down as mathematics. It's called an algorithm.
Tom Stoppard
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Mountains are not pyramids and trees are not cones. God must love gunnery and architecture if Euclid is his only Geometry.
Tom Stoppard
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Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
Tom Stoppard
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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.
Tom Stoppard
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I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.
Tom Stoppard
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I will take his secret to the grave, telling people along the way. Betrayal is no sin if it is whimsical.
Tom Stoppard
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Expectation in the general sense may be considered as a kind of average.
Tom Stoppard
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Lending one's bicycle is a form of safe sex, possibly the safest there is.
Tom Stoppard
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Quote of the day
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Carrie Chapman Catt
Tom Stoppard
Creative Commons
Born:
July 3, 1937
(age 87)
Bio:
Sir Tom Stoppard is a British playwright and screenwriter, knighted in 1997.
Known for:
Arcadia (1966)
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966)
The Real Thing (1980)
Travesties (1975)
The Invention of Love (1997)
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