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.
The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. (pg. 326, The Pleasures of Eating)
I count my blessings far more than I count my money.
At 11 years old, I made a very definitive decision, and my decision was that I wanted to be happy. Above and beyond anything I ever did in my life, I wanted to be happy.
Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.
Mindfulness helps you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognize a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes.
The more we allow ourselves to enjoy, the more reasons we find to be joyful.
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