Happiness Quote by Anthony Trollope

Trollope punctures the Victorian daydream of leisure with a needle that still draws blood: stop working, and society will stop taking you seriously. The line is built like a polite warning, but it’s really a social diagnosis. “Hardly compatible” carries the cool tone of a man pretending to be reasonable while delivering a verdict. Happiness isn’t denied outright; it’s framed as an impractical fantasy once you account for the way status actually functions.

The key move is that “diminished respect” doesn’t come from the self, but from “which ever attends” - a passive, supposedly universal force. Trollope naturalizes judgment as if it’s weather. That’s the subtext: people will tell you to rest, but the culture is rigged to punish rest. “Relinquishing of labour” is deliberately formal, almost legalistic, making retirement sound like a surrender rather than a reward. Work isn’t just an economic necessity; it’s a moral performance that buys you visibility, credibility, membership.

Context matters. Trollope wrote inside a world where industriousness was both ideology and identity, and he himself was famously disciplined, producing novels with near bureaucratic regularity while holding a postal job. That background sharpens the intent: he’s not romanticizing toil, he’s observing the social tax levied on those who step off the treadmill. Read now, it lands as an early critique of hustle culture’s oldest trick - turning labor into dignity so that opting out feels like disgrace.