Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. Equilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to your world. When the world shifts, you shift.
Interpretation
Happiness is about finding balance in life and adapting to changes around you.
In this quote, Tom Stoppard highlights the importance of equilibrium in achieving happiness. He suggests that to maintain our happiness, we must learn to adjust ourselves in response to the constant changes in our surroundings, thereby rebalancing our perspectives and priorities. It's a reminder that happiness is not a destination, but rather a dynamic state that requires active engagement with the shifts in our lives.
In practice
During a speech on mental health, a speaker quotes Stoppard to emphasize the need for personal balance.
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.
That's right," said Eeyore. "Sing. Umty-tiddly, umty-too. Here we go gathering Nuts and May. Enjoy yourself." "I am," said Pooh.
Don't let your happiness depend on something you may lose.
It turns out that the process of working toward a goal, participating in a valued and challenging activity, is as important to well-being as its attainment.
Mankind . . . possesses two supreme blessings. First of these is the goddess Demeter, or Earth whichever name you choose to call her by. It was she who gave to man his nourishment of grain. But after her there came the son of Semele, who matched her present by inventing liquid wine as his gift to man. For filled with that good gift, suffering mankind forgets its grief; from it comes sleep; with it oblivion of the troubles of the day. There is no other medicine for misery.
The happiest time of my life is now.
The unselfish effort to bring cheer to others will be the beginning of a happier life for ourselves.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.