From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
Interpretation
Principles guide assumptions, but only facts can lead to true certainty.
This quote by Tom Stoppard emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between theoretical principles and empirical facts. While principles can help us make predictions or understand probabilities, it's only through concrete evidence or facts that we can attain genuine truth or certainty. This invites reflection on the nature of knowledge and the reliability of our beliefs.
In practice
In a debate about knowledge, this quote could highlight the need for evidence-based arguments.
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.
There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.
Poets are always making waves. I mean, you know, in an ideal situation, the ideal republic can't tolerate poets because - it isn't that they mutter and criticize; it is that the poet does not accept the situation called the 'perfect' condition of man - in other words, perfect in the materialistic sense.
I loathe my name because it is mine and also because it is not mine; it is at once too intimate and seems to have no connection with me. Perhaps because the name is quite common, it never seems to fit me, or fit me alone. Nevertheless, when I see the name, I always feel a peculiar sense of shame.
But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you--knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that.
To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
The moment that justice must be paid for by the victim of injustice it becomes itself injustice.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.