Tom Stoppard - Arcadia (1966)

12 Sourced Quotes

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It is a defect of God's humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.

Tom Stoppard
Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light.

Tom Stoppard
I'd push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except the one in the wheelchair, I think I'd lose the sympathy vote before people had time to think it through.

Tom Stoppard
Thomasina: If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.

Tom Stoppard
Oh, you're going to zap me with penicillin and pesticides. Spare me that and I'll spare you the bomb and aerosols. But don't confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There's no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle's cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars - big bangs, black holes - who gives a shit? How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money?

Tom Stoppard
The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.

Tom Stoppard
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Tom Stoppard
It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

Tom Stoppard
Chater: You insulted my wife in the gazebo yesterday evening!
Septimus: You are mistaken. I made love to your wife in the gazebo. She asked me to meet her there, I have her note somewhere, I dare say I could find it for you, and if someone is putting it about that I did not turn up, by God, sir, it is a slander.

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

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