Tom Stoppard Quotes

One idea I explore in my stand-up show is whether, if you try looking at the universe rationally and avoid coping mechanisms like mysticism or religion, you can still be happy knowing you are going to die after a brief time on this spinning ball.

In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.

How can we live and die and never know the difference?

You don't waste your entire life waiting to go back to dust.

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.

What's the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.

My understanding of life is very existential. I think that we are our bodies. There's nothing else, and when we die, that's it. No afterlife.

In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life

life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation

Through the ages, man's main concern was life after death. Today, for the first time, we find we must ask questions about whether there will be life before death.

We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, "I wish I hadn't been born?" Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?

How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?

I finally did not understand if we are living to survive or we are living to die!

Dying men think of funny things-and that's what we all are here, aren't we? Dying men.

I think it's really tragic when people get serious about stuff. It's such an absurdity to take anything really seriously ... I make an honest attempt not to take anything seriously: I worked that attitude out about the time I was eighteen, I mean, what does it all mean when you get right down to it, what's the story here? Being alive is so weird.

What interests me is love, sex, death, cruelty, compassion and the desire for meaning in an apparently godless universe. In other words the human condition.

I think life's an irrational obsession.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up?