Quotes by Tom Stoppard

“What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?”

“Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”

“Confession is an act of violence against the unoffending.”

“Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they g...”

“People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.”

“Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.”

“Philosophy consists in moderating each life so that many lives will fit together with as much liberty and justice as will keep them together: and not so much as will make them fly apart, when the h...”

“There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it. ”

“A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.”

“The bad end unhappily; the good, unluckily. That is what tragedy means.”

“It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.”

“Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”

“There are no commitments, only bargains. And they have to be made again every day. You think making a commitment is it. Finish. You think it sets like a concrete platform and it'll take any strain ...”

“He could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held back for another day the intermediate experience would provide the right one. There was no end to ...”

“A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.”

“Uncertainty is the normal state.”

“A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynastyand, by which definition, a philosopherdreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese ...”

“Death is the ultimate negative.”

“As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.”

“You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.”