A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.
Interpretation
Talking to oneself can be rational, whereas even nonsensical thoughts can be considered sane if they are not vocalized.
This quote by Tom Stoppard suggests that self-reflection and inner dialogue are not signs of madness, unlike societal perceptions might imply. In fact, it highlights the idea that speaking rationally to oneself is no more crazy than holding nonsensical thoughts without expressing them. It challenges the notion of sanity and asks us to consider the nature of our thoughts and how we communicate with ourselves.
In practice
In a motivational speech about mental wellness, you could use this quote to encourage self-reflection.
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.
What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?
Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.
I am Patrick, a sinner, most uncultivated and least of all the faithful and despised in the eyes of many.
Time comes to us softly, slowly. It sits beside us for a while. Then, long before we are ready, it moves on.
I reject karma and rebirth not only because I find them unintelligible, but because I believe they obscure and distort what the Buddha was trying to say. Rather than offering the balm of consolation, the Buddha encouraged us to peer deep and unflinchingly into the heart of the bewildering and painful experience that life can so often be.
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