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.
The happiness of men consists in life. And life is in labor.
For those who are poor in happiness, each time is a first time; happiness never becomes a habit.
Happiness is the ability to move forward, knowing the future will be better than the past.
I have chosen to be happy because it is goo for my health.
If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich.
A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.
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