649 Quotes by Tom Stoppard

I've got no interest in educating or instructing people.

How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.

I don't know that I want to share all my most intimate secrets.

I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon.

Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.

There's something scary about stupidity made coherent.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.

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.

I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays.