Top 200 Tom Stoppard Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Well, we’ll know better next time.”

— Tom Stoppard

102. “I don’t think Stoppardian has a precise definition.”

— Tom Stoppard

103. “Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.”

— Tom Stoppard

104. “When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I’ve dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells.”

— Tom Stoppard

105. “It takes a lot of effort to be vibrant.”

— Tom Stoppard

106. “I’m offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.”

— Tom Stoppard

107. “If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.”

— Tom Stoppard

108. “Personally I am in favour of education but a university is not the place for it.”

— Tom Stoppard

109. “I take every possible side.”

— Tom Stoppard

110. “War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don’t want to be a hero.”

— Tom Stoppard

111. “We’ve traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.”

— Tom Stoppard

112. “My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.”

— Tom Stoppard

113. “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.”

— Tom Stoppard

114. “The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about – clouds – daffodils – waterfalls – what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in – these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.”

— Tom Stoppard

115. “Traitors hoist by their own petard? – or victims of the gods? – we shall never know!”

— Tom Stoppard

116. “Between “just desserts” and “tragic irony” we are given quite a lot of scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they reasonably get.”

— Tom Stoppard

117. “We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.”

— Tom Stoppard

118. “Every age thinks it’s the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!”

— Tom Stoppard

119. “Uncertainty is the normal state.”

— Tom Stoppard

120. “The days of the digital watch are numbered.”

— Tom Stoppard

121. “Don’t clap too loudly – it’s a very old world.”

— Tom Stoppard

122. “Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.”

— Tom Stoppard

123. “Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef.”

— Tom Stoppard

124. “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.”

— Tom Stoppard

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

— Tom Stoppard

126. “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.”

— Tom Stoppard

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

— Tom Stoppard

128. “Player: Relax. Respond. That’s what people do. You can’t go through life question your sitution at every turn.”

— Tom Stoppard

129. “Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.”

— Tom Stoppard

130. “What did you have in mind? A short, blunt human pyramid?”

— Tom Stoppard

131. “The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices – after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people’s.”

— Tom Stoppard

132. “He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.”

— Tom Stoppard

133. “The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.”

— Tom Stoppard

134. “I’ve lost all capacity for disbelief. I’m not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.”

— Tom Stoppard

135. “Public postures have the configuration of private derangement.”

— Tom Stoppard

136. “Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.”

— Tom Stoppard

137. “You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neither does it make you an artist.”

— Tom Stoppard

138. “Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction! Septimus: 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.”

— Tom Stoppard

139. “Death is the ultimate negative.”

— Tom Stoppard

140. “I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did.”

— Tom Stoppard

141. “I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn’t ever get to meet.”

— Tom Stoppard

142. “The names for things don’t come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.”

— Tom Stoppard

143. “My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.”

— Tom Stoppard

144. “You can’t but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it’s a narrative art form.”

— Tom Stoppard

145. “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.”

— Tom Stoppard

146. “If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.”

— Tom Stoppard

147. “You can’t treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.”

— Tom Stoppard

148. “We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there’s only one direction. And time is its only measure.”

— Tom Stoppard

149. “Back in the East you can’t do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.”

— Tom Stoppard

150. “To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.”

— Tom Stoppard