The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that both chance and destiny play roles in shaping our reality.
Tom Stoppard's quote highlights the interplay between unpredictability and predetermined outcomes in life. It implies that while some events are beyond our control, others are set in motion by choices and circumstances, creating the complex tapestry of existence as we know it. This duality invites contemplation on the nature of fate and free will, encouraging us to consider how both elements contribute to our experiences.
In practice
In a speech about overcoming challenges, one could use this quote to illustrate the balance between unpredictability and planning.
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.
A person who is obsessed thinks about heaven frequently. Obsessed people orient their lives around eternity; they are not fixed only on what is here in front of them.
Out of Mahat comes universal egoism.
Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know in life.
Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is.
Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain. (Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)
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