Quotes by Tom Stoppard

“A lesson in folly is worth two in wisdom.”

“We can all be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin. . .if the question is, how do you make a poem by Pushkin?- or, what exactly makes one poem or painting or piece of mus...”

“An artist is the magician put among men to gratify--capriciously--their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fiel...”

“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 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 ...”

“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.”

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

“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 Chines...”

“WILDE: Oh — Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can't be helped. The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betraya...”

“Free to move, speak, extemporize, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the mom...”

“I believe in mess, tears, pain, self-abasement, loss of self-respect, nakedness. Not caring doesn’t seem much different from not loving.”

“THOMASINA:But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!”

“Everything has to be taken on trust truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is hon...”

“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...”

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