Top 200 Tom Stoppard Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A healthy attitude is contagious but don’t wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.”

— Tom Stoppard

Featured in: Positive Quotes, Attitude Quotes, Health Quotes

2. “Every exit is an entry somewhere else.”

— Tom Stoppard

3. “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

4. “Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.”

— Tom Stoppard

5. “If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.”

— Tom Stoppard

6. “I’m a very boring person.”

— Tom Stoppard

7. “Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child.”

— Tom Stoppard

8. “I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.”

— Tom Stoppard

9. “Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.”

— Tom Stoppard

10. “War is capitalism with the gloves off.”

— Tom Stoppard

11. “I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.”

— Tom Stoppard

12. “We’re actors. We’re the opposite of people.”

— Tom Stoppard

13. “Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.”

— Tom Stoppard

14. “Good things, when short, are twice as good.”

— Tom Stoppard

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

— Tom Stoppard

16. “Life is a gamble, at terrible odds – if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it.”

— Tom Stoppard

17. “There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said – no. But somehow we missed it.”

— Tom Stoppard

18. “Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.”

— Tom Stoppard

19. “It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.”

— Tom Stoppard

20. “Consistency is all I ask!”

— Tom Stoppard

21. “Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light.”

— Tom Stoppard

22. “No problem is insoluble, given a big enough plastic bag.”

— Tom Stoppard

23. “We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good’s a brick to a drowning man?”

— Tom Stoppard

24. “For all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.”

— Tom Stoppard

25. “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

26. “All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.”

— Tom Stoppard

27. “It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it’s a painting, and if you can walk around it it’s a sculpture.”

— Tom Stoppard

28. “From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.”

— Tom Stoppard

29. “Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.”

— Tom Stoppard

30. “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 your world. When the world shifts, you shift.”

— Tom Stoppard

31. “It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.”

— Tom Stoppard

32. “Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.”

— Tom Stoppard

33. “When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.”

— Tom Stoppard

34. “It’s no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.”

— Tom Stoppard

35. “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

36. “Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.”

— Tom Stoppard

37. “Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it all going to end?”

— Tom Stoppard

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

— Tom Stoppard

39. “Pirates could happen to anyone.”

— Tom Stoppard

40. “Stark raving sane.”

— Tom Stoppard

41. “I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life.”

— Tom Stoppard

42. “Your opinions are your symptoms.”

— Tom Stoppard

43. “I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.”

— Tom Stoppard

44. “Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.”

— Tom Stoppard

45. “The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.”

— Tom Stoppard

46. “It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.”

— Tom Stoppard

47. “I’m attracted to the past.”

— Tom Stoppard

48. “I burn with no causes.”

— Tom Stoppard

49. “Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.”

— Tom Stoppard

50. “Get me inside any boardroom and I’ll get any decision I want.”

— Tom Stoppard