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

About Tom Stoppard

Portrait of Tom Stoppard

Sir Tom Stoppard (; born Tomáš Sträussler; 3 July 1937 – 29 November 2025) was a British playwright and screenwriter. He wrote for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covered the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical...

More quotations from Tom Stoppard

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

—Tom Stoppard

A republican government is slow to move, yet once in motion it's momentum becomes irresistible.

—Tom Stoppard

If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.

—Tom Stoppard

We're actors—we're the opposite of people.

—Tom Stoppard

humor opposites acting

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.

—Tom Stoppard

More quotations tagged with “truth”

You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it; it is by nature self-erasing; you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

—E. L. Doctorow

truth memory sex brain

Truth makes on the ocean of nature no one track of light; every eye, looking on, finds its own.

—Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Who ever said that doctors are truthful or even intelligent? You're getting a lot if they know their profession. Don't ask any more from them. They're only human, after all.

—Marjorie Karmel

truth intelligence medicine doctors

There are no whole truths; all truths are half- truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

—Alfred North Whitehead

History

10 Jan 2016 Added