Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard Quotes
154 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
And for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute...
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
I know the British press is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
You had only two friends in the world, and having killed one you can't afford to irritate the other.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction. And time is its only measure.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
Alexander: How the world must have been changing while I was holding it still.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
Wars are fought for oil wells and coaling stations; for control of the Dardanelles or the Suez Canal; for colonial pickings to buy cheap in and conquered markets to sell dear in. War is capitalism with the gloves off.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
I never got used to the way the house Trots fell into the jargon back in Grimsby — I mean, on any other subject, like the death of the novel, or the sex life of the editor's secretary, they spoke ordinary English, but as soon as they started trying to get me to join the strike it was as if their brains had been taken out and replaced by one of those little golf-ball things you get in electric typewriters... "Betrayal"… "Confrontation"… "Management"… My God, you'd need a more supple language than that to describe an argument between two amoebas.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me—I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.
Tom Stoppard
Source
Report...
Miss Frobisher smiles, with little cause that I know of. If Jesus of Nazareth had had before him the example of Miss Frobisher getting through the Latin degree papers of the London University Examinations Board he wouldn't have had to fall back on camels and the eyes of needles, and Miss Frobisher's name would be a delightful surprise to encounter in Matthew, Chapter 19; as would, even more surprisingly, the London University Examinations Board. Your name is not Miss Frobisher? What is your name? Miss Burton. I'm very sorry. I stand corrected. If Jesus of Nazareth had had before him the example of Miss Burton getting through the... Oh, dear, I hope it is not I who have made you cry.
Tom Stoppard
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
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)
Most used words:
people
love
time
life
artist
knowledge
alexander
war
write
thought
death
truth
moment
philosophy
idea
Tom Stoppard on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Tom Stoppard Quotes
Tom Stoppard Short Quotes
Quotes about Tom Stoppard
British Playwright Quotes
Playwright Quotes
20th-century Playwright Quotes
Related People
Robert Harris
English Novelist
Harold Pinter
British Playwright
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes