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.
The act of vagabonding is not an isolated trend so much as it is a spectral connection between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language.
Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.
When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.
I stay away from heavy-handed stuff, the good guy and the bad guy. It just doesn't interest me; all it does is create more fences between people, I think.
Every man's death is standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love the man who stands for us.
The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation; extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability.
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