"It's only we humans who want to own the future, too"
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
"Your opinions are your symptoms."
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
"Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos."
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
"Be happy — if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?"
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
"Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum."
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
"Never believe in mirrors or newspapers."
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
"There's something scary about stupidity made coherent."
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
"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 (1937-2025)
"If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older."
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
"A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier."
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
"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."
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
"Death is always a great pity of course but it's not as though the alternative were immortality."
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
“It’s the best possible time of being alive,
when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
“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 (1937-2025)
“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 (1937-2025)
“Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
“There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said — no. But somehow we missed it.”
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
“Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.”
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
“We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.”
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
“I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.”
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
“It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.”
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
“Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
“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 (1937-2025)
“The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.”
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
“Give us this day our daily mask.”
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
“Uncertainty is the normal state.”
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
"The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists."
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
"Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering; the capacity for self-indulgence changes hands."
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
"Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?"
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
"Wars are fought for oil wells and coaling stations; for control of the Dardanelles or the Suez Canal; for colonial pickings to buy cheap in and conquered markets to sell dear in. War is capitalism with the gloves off."
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
"Personally I am in favour of education but a university is not the place for it."
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)