Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.
Interpretation
Childhood represents a unique period of untainted joy, which is often lost as one gains knowledge and experience.
In this quote, Tom Stoppard suggests that childhood is a fleeting time characterized by innocence and pure happiness. As individuals grow older, they accumulate knowledge and experiences that can complicate their understanding of happiness, making it harder to find joy in the same way it was found during childhood.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of preserving childhood innocence in today's world.
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.
Christmas is here, Merry old Christmas, Gift-bearing Christmas, Day of grand memories, King of the year!
In spite of discouragement and adversity, those who are happiest seem to have a way of learning from difficult times, becoming stronger, wiser and happier as a result.
All happiness comes from awareness. The more we are conscious the deeper the joy. Acceptance of pain, non-resistance, courage and endurance - these open deep and perennial sources of real happiness, true bliss.
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.
...I learned to be grateful no matter what happened in my life!
Meditation is the direct means of enjoying the greatest happiness and is the only means to quench the thirst for happiness on earth.
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