Tom Stoppard Quotes

VALENTINE: Your tea gets cold by itself, it doesn't get hot by itself. Do you think that's odd? HANNAH: No. VALENTINE: Well, it is odd. Heat goes to cold. It's a one-way street. Your tea will end up at room temperature.

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

You can put back the bits of glass but you can't collect up the heat of the smash. It's gone.

The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.

See? In an ocean of ashes, islands of order. Patterns making themselves out of nothing. I can't show you how deep it goes. Each picture is a detail of the previous one, blown up. And so on. For ever. Pretty nice, eh?

Am I fucked? What does it really amount to? When all's said and done? Am I fucked?

The questions you're asking don't matter, you see. It's like arguing who got there first with the calculus. The English say Newton, the Germans say Leibnitz. But it doesn't matter. Personalities. What matters is the calculus. Scientific progress. Knowledge.

Newton's equations go forwards and backwards, they do not care which way. But the heat equation cares very much, it goes only one way.

But surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence.

People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles.

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.

I can't think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars - big bangs, black holes – who gives a shit?!

The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to be in that part of the plan.

We were quite happy with Aristotle's cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe.

If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'?

The future is disorder. 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 to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

It'll take a while but we're all going to end up at room temperature.

Chaps sometimes wanted to marry me, and I don't know a worse bargain. Available sex against not being allowed to fart in bed.

Then maths left the real world behind, just like modern art, really. Nature was classical, maths was suddenly Picassos. But now nature is having the last laugh. The freaky stuff is turning out to be the mathematics of the natural world.

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.