Success is a sort of metaphysical experience. I live exactly as I did before - only on a slightly bigger scale. Naturally, I won't be corrupted. I'll sit there in my Rolls, uncorrupted, and tell my chauffeur, uncorruptedly, where to go.
Interpretation
Success doesn't change a person's core; it merely amplifies existing traits and lifestyles.
In this quote, Tom Stoppard suggests that success is not an ultimate transformation but rather an extension of one's previous life experiences and values. He highlights that despite his newfound wealth, he remains unaltered at his core, emphasizing the importance of maintaining integrity and authenticity, regardless of one's external circumstances.
In practice
A motivational speaker could use this quote to illustrate the importance of staying true to oneself despite achieving success.
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.
There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.
Someone is out there looking to put you out of business. Someone is out there who thinks they have a better idea than you have. A better solution than you have. A better or more efficient product than you have.
The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
Of course, once you've been a Beatle, you're never really out of it. People always want to know what you're up to, and if you don't immediately tell 'em, that's when they start making stuff up.
Don't measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability.
Scorn also to depress thy competitor by any dishonest or unworthy method; strive to raise thyself above him only by excelling him; so shall thy contest for superiority be crowned with honour, if not with success.
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