"It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them."
— Tom Stoppard

"If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation."
— Tom Stoppard

"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

"Pirates could happen to anyone."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

"We're actors--we're the opposite of people."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - A Play)

"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 into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature's highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we're expected! But there is no such place, that's why it's called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us."
— Tom Stoppard (The Coast of Utopia)

"Every exit is an entrance somewhere else."
— Tom Stoppard

"There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it. "
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

"Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

"I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture."
— Tom Stoppard

"Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead)

"We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

"
"Whatever became of the moment
when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood, when it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory. And yet I can't remember it. It never occurred to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it, before we know that there are words,out we come, bloodied and squalling...with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction
and time is its only measure." -Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead."
— Tom Stoppard

"I'm going to be dead before I read the books I'm going to read."
— Tom Stoppard

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

"
— Tom Stoppard

"It is of course better to know useless things than to know nothing. "
— Tom Stoppard

"Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?"
— Tom Stoppard (ROSENCRANTZ & GILDENSTERN ARE DEAD)

""Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.""
— Tom Stoppard

"We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead)

"Age is a very high price to pay for maturity"
— Tom Stoppard

"It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst."
— Tom Stoppard

"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 get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead."
— Tom Stoppard (The Real Thing)

"The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks."
— Tom Stoppard (Arcadia: A Play)

"Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art."
— Tom Stoppard

"Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little..."
— Tom Stoppard

"If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older."
— Tom Stoppard

"A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until--"My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience..."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.)

"We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction. And time is its only measure."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

"Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway.
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: England.
Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then? "
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead)

"HENRY:
Leave me out of it. They don’t count. Maybe Brodie got a raw deal, maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. It doesn’t count. He’s a lout with language. I can’t help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech…Words don’t deserve that kind of malarkey. 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 get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more, and Brodie knocks their corners off. I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.
Act II, Scene 5, HENRY and ANNIE"
— Tom Stoppard (The Real Thing)

"We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.)

"Words, words. They're all we have to go on."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

"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 the march. but there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it."
— Tom Stoppard (Arcadia)

"What a fine persecution-to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.)

""the natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. strangely enough it all works out in the end... it's a mystery.""
— Tom Stoppard

"I am not my body. My body is nothing without me."
— Tom Stoppard (Rock 'n' Roll: A New Play)

"They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue. She made him the happiest man in the whole world and the most wretched, and after a few years she died, and then, when he was thirty, he died, too. But by that time Catullus had invented the love poem."
— Tom Stoppard (The Invention of Love)

"Success in life is to maintain this ecstasy, to burn always with this hard gemlike flame.
"
— Tom Stoppard (The Invention of Love)

""If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice."
"
— Tom Stoppard

"...and for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute..."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

"James Joyce – an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized."
— Tom Stoppard

"It would have been nice to have had unicorns."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead)

"Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little."
— 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 (The Invention of Love)

"Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. 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; his two-fold security. "
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead)

"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 speak for you when you are dead."
— Tom Stoppard

"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 (The Invention of Love)

"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 the march, but there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it."
— Tom Stoppard (Arcadia)

"What we’re trying to do is write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might … travel … ([He] picks up the script.) Now, what we’ve got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball would travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting ‘Ouch!’ with your hands stuck into your armpits. (indicating the cricket bat) This isn’t better because someone says it’s better, or because there’s a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lords. It’s better because it’s better."
— Tom Stoppard

"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."
— Tom Stoppard