When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.
Interpretation
As we age, the complexity of our thoughts and the mental space required to process them increases.
This quote by Tom Stoppard reflects on the contrast between youthful simplicity and adult complexity. The speaker conveys how the ability to be productive and creative changes over time, suggesting that maturity brings not only responsibilities but also a deeper need for solitude and introspection to navigate one's thoughts. The phrases about needing more time to reconnect with one's inner self highlight the challenges of adult life, where distractions and demands often overshadow the clarity that once came easily.
In practice
In a workshop about mindfulness, this quote can be shared to emphasize the importance of mental space.
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 I believe' is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect.
At first it seems obvious, but the more you think about it the stranger the deductions from this axiom seem to become; in the end you cease to understand what is meant by it.
No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.
An unexamined life is a life of no account.
It is altogether unlawful to kill oneself... Wherefore suicide is contrary to the inclination of nature, and to charity whereby every man should love himself... Life is God's gift to man, and is subject to His power, Who kills and makes to live. Hence whoever takes his own life, sins against God... for it belongs to God alone to pronounce sentence of death and life.
Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?
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