Quotes from Tom Stoppard

you've no idea, the whole Army's obsessed with playing at soldiers...

I'm leaving everything here. Your records? No. Everything else.

POLEVOY (to Chaadaev)     But no doubt you have read Kukolnik's play? CHAADAEV     No … I started to read it, but after a while I seemed to lose interest, and I was still on the title. Stankevich

I don't know of anything greater than the Appassionata. Amazing, superhuman music. It always makes me feel, perhaps naively, it makes me feel proud of the miracles that human beings can perform. But I can't listen to music often. It affects my nerves, makes me want to say nice stupid things and pat the heads of those people who while living in this vile hell can create such beauty.

Lost objects from another life are restored to you in the belly of a carp.

Moon felt as if the conversation was a weight he had to drag along on the end of a rope.

That's it then, is it? What was it all about? When did it begin?

Knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or 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.

No tengo lo que quería, eso es verdad, pero quiero lo que tengo.

I renounce all love except pure philosophical love. The so-called love of human animals removes people two by two from the only possibility of happiness, which is the communion of beautiful souls.

Schelling's God is the totality of Nature struggling towards consciousness, and Man is as far as the struggle has got, with the animals not too far behind, vegetables somewhat lagging, and rocks nowhere as yet. Do we believe this? Does it matter? Think of it as a poem or a painting. Art doesn't have to be true like a theorem. It can be true in other ways. This truth says there is a meaning to it all, and Man is where the meaning begins to show.

What freedom means, is being allowed to sing in my bath as loudly as will not interfere with my neighbour's freedom to sing a different tune in his.

You cannot stir things apart.

Philosophy consists in moderating each life so that many lives will fit together with as much liberty and justice as will keep them together: and not so much as will make them fly apart, when the harm will be the greater.

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 backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

Dotty (off): HELP! ... Archie: It's all right—just exhibitionism: what we psychiatrists call 'a cry for help'. Bones: But it was a cry for help. Archie: Perhaps I'm not making myself clear. All exhibitionism is a crey for help, but a cry for help as such is only exhibitionism.

Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.

Thomasina (to Septimus) How is a ruined child different from a ruined castle? Septimus On such questions I defer to Mr Noakes. Noakes (out of his depth) A ruined castle is picturesque, certainly. Septimus That is the main difference. (to Brice) I teach the classical authors. If I do not elucidate their meaning, who will?

It is plain that there are some things a girl is allowed to understand, and these include the whole of algebra, but there are others, such as embracing a side of beef, that must be kept from her until she is old enough to have a carcass of her own.

Noakes (bleating) Lord Little has one very similar – Lady Croom I cannot relieve Lord Little's misfortunes by adding to my own. Pray, what is this rustic hovel that presumes to superpose itself on my gazebo?

Mr Chater, you are a welcome guest at Sidley Park but while you are one, The Castle of Otranto was written by whomsoever I say it was, otherwise what is the point of being a guest or having one?

You're a writer. You write because you're a writer. Even when you write about something, you have to think up something to write about just so you can keep writing.

To be morally educated is to realize that such would be a terrible price. Mechanical advance is the slack taken up of Our failing humanity. Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.

Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything ... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more ... the endless time of never coming back ... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound