Quote

It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God.

Tom Stoppard

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Tom Stoppard
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 3
Dramaturge
Film Director
Journalist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Zlin
Sir Tom Stoppard
Thing
Purpose
Hearted
Good
Left
Shine
Away
Useless
Doesn
Useful
Light
Shining
Elaboration
Matter
Sake
Humanness
Take
Darkness
Nearest
Real
Knowledge
Faint

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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I'm attracted to the past.
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To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.
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All mystical experience is coincidence and vice versa, of course.
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I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.
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Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?
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Suicide is no more than a trick played on the calendar.
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It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.
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When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells.
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I know the British press is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him.
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A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.
Tom Stoppard
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To be frank: the translations that often sound bad in the mouths of the actors, these have often been done by linguists.
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Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn't bring death home to anyone- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says- 'One day you are going to die.
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Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order
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Your opinions are your symptoms.
Tom Stoppard
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It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.
Tom Stoppard
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A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
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I don't keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don't keep an archive. There's something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays.
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Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.
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It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable ... it's better to be quotable than honest.
Tom Stoppard
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It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
Tom Stoppard