Quotes from Tom Stoppard

Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. Equilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to the world. When the world shifts, you shift.

Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it.

The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.

We're actors - we're the opposite of people.

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.

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

Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.

We're actors — we're the opposite of people!

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.

I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.

Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn't take it.

Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?

Pirates could happen to anyone.

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

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.

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.

Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats. Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats.

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.

Words, words. They're all we have to go on.

I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.

Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?

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.