I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.
Interpretation
Civilization tries to organize human nature, which is often too complex for such simplification.
Tom Stoppard's quote suggests that the evolution of civilization involves efforts to systematically understand and categorize human nature. However, he implies that the multifaceted and often chaotic aspects of humanity resist such rigid classifications, highlighting the limitations of our attempts to make sense of ourselves within structured frameworks.
In practice
During a lecture on philosophy, this quote can be used to discuss the limitations of categorizing human behavior.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
This life is not man's own show; if he becomes personally and emotionally involved in the very complicated cosmic drama, he reaps inevitable suffering for having distorted the divine 'plot.'
We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organ of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing by ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm.
People forget that when you're 16, you're probably more serious than you'll ever be again. You think seriously about the big questions.
Things looked at patiently from one side after another generally end by showing a side that is beautiful.
I think the O.J. Simpson trial was a revelation about the ongoing patterns of racial difference in American society.
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,_x000D_ And out of the caverns of rain,_x000D_ Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,_x000D_ I arise and unbuild it again.
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