Tom Stoppard Quotes - Page 9

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.

I'm going to be dead before I read the books I'm going to read.

My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.

The hard part is getting to the top of page 1.

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.

We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.

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 Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.

My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.

Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect.

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

James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.

I'm a very boring person.

I should have the courage of my lack of convictions.

The idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while all the people walking about are mad is merely a literary cliche, put about by people who should be locked up. I assure you there is not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there the sick are in here. For example you are in here because you have delusions that sane people are put in mental hospitals.

Death is the ultimate negative.

The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.

Well, we'll know better next time.

Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king." "Yes." "Unorthodox.

It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.

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

I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.

If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.

I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet.

Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.

You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.