“Age is a high price to pay for maturity.”
0 likes
Author detail
Sir Tom Stoppard (born Tomáš Sträussler) was a Czech and English playwright and screenwriter. He wrote for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covered the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical bases of society. Stoppard was a playwright of the National Theatre; one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation; and critically compared with William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997 and awarded the Order of Merit in 2000.
Quotes
Showing 1-20 of 211
“Age is a high price to pay for maturity.”
0 likes
“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...”
0 likes
“It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.”
0 likes
“I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.”
0 likes
“Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?”
“We're actors — we're the opposite of people!”
“Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Val...”
0 likes
“The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.”
“Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself int...”
0 likes
“Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negati...”
“I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will spea...”
“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”
0 likes
“Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.”
0 likes
“I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.”
“The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live...”
“When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the ja...”
0 likes
“For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.”
“If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me o...”
0 likes
“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...”
“Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the stri...”
0 likes