Happiness Quote by Arthur Rubinstein

Rubinstein dresses a hard-earned philosophy in the lightness of a salon toast: life is a game, yes, but not a trivial one. The line lands because it refuses both melodrama and self-help certainty. A “game” implies rules you didn’t write, luck you can’t control, and the necessity of showing up anyway. Coming from a pianist whose career stretched across wars, exile, and the brutal churn of 20th-century Europe, the metaphor reads less like cheer and more like strategy: play on, because the alternative is surrender.

The sly pivot is “this truth at least, good friends, we know.” It’s intimate and performative at once, the way a musician addresses an audience without pretending it’s a lecture. Rubinstein isn’t offering metaphysics; he’s offering camaraderie. The subtext: you and I can’t solve existence, but we can agree on the minimum viable wisdom that keeps the room warm.

“Live and laugh, nor be dismayed” is not naive optimism; it’s a defiant tempo marking. Laughing becomes a discipline, not a distraction. Then comes the haunting grace note: “as one by one the phantoms go.” The word “phantoms” makes loss sound both inevitable and oddly unreal - lovers, ambitions, youth, even fear itself, slipping away like stage illusions after the performance. He’s telling you not to confuse disappearance with catastrophe. In a life spent interpreting scores night after night, Rubinstein suggests a musician’s consoling truth: the music ends, the notes vanish, meaning doesn’t.