I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I'm quite severe. But some might say they had the opposite impression of me.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the complexity of human personality, suggesting that people can have contrasting inner and outer selves.
Tom Stoppard's quote reveals the duality of human nature, where one's public persona may be vastly different from their internal experience. It highlights the idea that people often carry layers of complexity, leading to different perceptions from others. The reference to being both romantic and severe suggests that individuals can embody seemingly contradictory qualities, further emphasizing the nuanced nature of personality and the way we perceive ourselves versus how others perceive us.
In practice
During a psychology lecture about the duality of identity.
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.
But the fact a person denies that he is theorising is no reason for taking him at his word and failing to investigate what implicit theory is involved in his statements.
We must learn to talk with each other, and we mutually must understand and accept one another in our extraordinary differences.
Few people arise in the morning as hungry for God as they are for cornflakes or toast and eggs.
The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.
Speaking as a builder, if you start something, you must have a vision of the thing which arises from your instinct about preserving and enhancing what is there.
If I should die, think only this of me: that there's some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England.
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