Quotes from Tom Stoppard

You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.

There must have been a time, in the beginning, when we could have said – no. But somehow we missed it. Oh well, we'll know better next time.

Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.

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

I should have the courage of my lack of convictions.

I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.

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.

Confession is an act of violence against the unoffending.

GUIL (quietly): Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current…

Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light.

ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?

He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about.

I extract significance from melodrama, a significance which it does not in fact contain; but occasionally, from out of this matter, there escapes a thin beam of light that, seen at the right angle, can crack the shell of mortality.

GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear

It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.

To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.

Death is the ultimate negative.

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

and for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute...

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.

We ransomed our dignity to the clouds.

What do I want? Nothing which you'd call indecent, though I don't see what's wrong with it myself. You want to be brothers-in-arms, to have him to yourself... to be shipwrecked together, (to) perform valiant deeds to earn his admiration, to save him from certain death, to die for him - to die in his arms, like a Spartan, kissed once on the lips... or just run his errands in the meanwhile. You want him to know what cannot be spoken, and to make the perfect reply, in the same language.

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 strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible!

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.