Tom Stoppard - The Invention of Love (1997)

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Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.

Tom Stoppard
It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God.

Tom Stoppard
A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma.

Tom Stoppard
Personally I am in favour of education but a university is not the place for it.

Tom Stoppard
A genuine love of learning is one of the two delinquencies which cause blindness and lead a young man to ruin.

Tom Stoppard
They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue.

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

Tom Stoppard
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
Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.

Tom Stoppard
I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.

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

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

Tom Stoppard