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

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Wars are fought for oil wells and coaling stations for control of the Dardanelles or the Suez Canal for colonial pickings to buy cheap in and conquered markets to sell dear in. War is capitalism with the gloves off.
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A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.
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For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.
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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.
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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.
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...reality, the name we give to the common experience.
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Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond.
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Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.
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You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?
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I really love being in postproduction. First of all, it's all quite self-interested: You can protect things.
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I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.
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If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.
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I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.
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In England the rich own the poor and the men own the women.
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I'm attracted to the past.
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My mind gets into a verbal mode.
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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.
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I will take his secret to the grave, telling people I meet on the way.
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