Daily Inspiration Quote by Tom Stoppard

Stoppard’s line smuggles a defense of curiosity into a wry little insult: if your choices are “useless things” or “nothing,” then the real target isn’t trivia, it’s the pose of willful emptiness. The “of course” is doing the sly work. It pretends the argument is settled, commonsense, almost beneath debate, while quietly skewering the kind of utilitarian certainty that demands every fact justify its keep. Stoppard, a dramatist obsessed with ideas colliding onstage, knows how people use “practicality” as a social weapon: a way to brand art, philosophy, history, and play as indulgences for people who don’t have “real” jobs.

The subtext is theatrical: knowledge is not a ledger, it’s a repertoire. So-called useless things are the raw materials of metaphor, irony, and connection. A fact with no immediate application can still change how a person thinks, speaks, or notices. In Stoppard’s world, that’s not garnish; that’s the plot.

Context matters because Stoppard wrote through an age that fetishized expertise while shrinking the humanities. His plays repeatedly stage intelligence as both comedy and moral pressure: characters spar with information the way fencers spar with blades. This quote sides with the messy, promiscuous mind over the purified, optimized one. It’s an argument for mental surplus, for the humane value of knowing more than you can monetize, and for refusing the bleak prestige of knowing nothing at all.