Tom Stoppard Quotes

154 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
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
Expectation in the general sense may be considered as a kind of average.

Tom Stoppard
I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.

Tom Stoppard
I will take his secret to the grave, telling people along the way. Betrayal is no sin if it is whimsical.

Tom Stoppard
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
Lending one's bicycle is a form of safe sex, possibly the safest there is.

Tom Stoppard
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
Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.

Tom Stoppard
Mountains are not pyramids and trees are not cones. God must love gunnery and architecture if Euclid is his only Geometry.

Tom Stoppard
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
Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers... Today England looked like a nation of goalkeepers.

Tom Stoppard
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
On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night.

Tom Stoppard
If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.

Tom Stoppard
The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about which depend upon causes we know absolutely nothing about.

Tom Stoppard
GUIL: The law of averages, if I have got this right, means that if six monkeys were thrown up in the air for long enough they would land on their tails about as often as they would land on their —

Tom Stoppard
I can put two and two together, you know. Putting two and two together is my subject. I do not leap to hasty conclusions. I do not deal in suspicion and wild surmise. I examine the data; I look for logical inferences.

Tom Stoppard
GUIL: The equanimity of your average tosser of coins depends upon a law, or rather a tendency, or let us say a probability, or at any rate a mathematically calculable chance, which ensures that he will not upset himself by losing too much nor upset his opponent by winning too often.

Tom Stoppard
Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!

Tom Stoppard
It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable … it's better to be quotable than honest.

Tom Stoppard
Make a fist, and if your fist is as big as the nucleus of one atom then the atom is as big as St Paul's, and if it happens to be a hydrogen atom then it has a single electron flitting about like a moth in the empty cathedral, now by the dome, now by the altar.

Tom Stoppard