Tom Stoppard Quotes

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.

Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identified and learned by name; it is to these that words apply first and foremost.

Experience teaches us that thought does not express itself in words, but rather realizes itself in them

I dreamt that I could paint you with words, but there were no colors bright enough, black or white enough, blue or green enough...they didn't mean enough

Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?

For human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born.

Those things for which we find words, are things we have already overcome.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have.

Thinking in pictures is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.

I don't think there is any scientific evidence about the question of whether we think only in language or not. But introspection indicates pretty clearly that we don't think in language necessarily. We also think in visual images, we think in terms of situations and events, and so on, and many times we can't even express in words what the content of our thinking is. And even if we are able to express it in words, it is a common experience to say something and then to recognize that it is not what we meant, that it is something else.

Thought is not merely expressed in words, it comes into existence through them

I wish I could say everything in one word. I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end.

Language most shows a man; speak that I may see thee; it springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. No glass renders a man's form or likeness so true as his speech.

In every language, the first word after "Mama!" that every kid learns to say is "Mine!" A system that doesn't allow ownership, that doesn't allow you to say "Mine!" when you grow up, has - to put in mildly - a fatal design flaw.

There is a kind of nonlinguistic thought going on which we are trying to represent in language, and we know that sometimes we fail.

If you fell head first into a pigsty, you'd try to convince everybody you did it on purpose.

What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word 'quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.

Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses.

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do" "Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

At first I thought I would have to put on an English accent and try a sort of affected Shakespeare thing.

Words strain, crack, and sometime break, under the burden.

If you don't get it the first time, back up and try it again.

The mind has three operations: the formation of ideas, judgements and reasoning.

Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.