"Be happy. It's one way of being wise"
About this Quote
Colette’s line flatters happiness by refusing to treat it as a prize you win after becoming enlightened. It’s tactical, almost sly: “Be happy” arrives as an imperative, a deliberate posture, not a mood that politely appears when life cooperates. Then she undercuts any sentimental reading with the second sentence. Happiness isn’t opposed to wisdom here; it’s “one way” of it. Not the way. Not the proof. Just a route that counts.
The subtext is classic Colette: sensual, unsanctimonious, suspicious of moral theater. Wisdom is often sold as a kind of heroic grimness - the cultivated face of someone who has seen too much to enjoy anything. Colette flips that cliché. If you can stay available to pleasure, tenderness, appetite, and the small daily mercies of the body, you’re not being naive; you’re exercising discernment. Choosing happiness becomes a form of intelligence about what life actually offers, especially to people (and women, in particular) whose joys were expected to be deferred, managed, or made respectable.
Context matters: Colette wrote through the Belle Epoque, scandal, divorce, war, aging - eras and experiences that taught the costs of performative virtue. Her work is filled with the politics of the intimate: who gets to desire, who gets to roam, who gets to be “good.” Against that backdrop, happiness reads less like a greeting-card command and more like a quietly insurgent ethic. Wisdom, she implies, isn’t only surviving. It’s insisting, without apology, on moments worth living.
The subtext is classic Colette: sensual, unsanctimonious, suspicious of moral theater. Wisdom is often sold as a kind of heroic grimness - the cultivated face of someone who has seen too much to enjoy anything. Colette flips that cliché. If you can stay available to pleasure, tenderness, appetite, and the small daily mercies of the body, you’re not being naive; you’re exercising discernment. Choosing happiness becomes a form of intelligence about what life actually offers, especially to people (and women, in particular) whose joys were expected to be deferred, managed, or made respectable.
Context matters: Colette wrote through the Belle Epoque, scandal, divorce, war, aging - eras and experiences that taught the costs of performative virtue. Her work is filled with the politics of the intimate: who gets to desire, who gets to roam, who gets to be “good.” Against that backdrop, happiness reads less like a greeting-card command and more like a quietly insurgent ethic. Wisdom, she implies, isn’t only surviving. It’s insisting, without apology, on moments worth living.
Quote Details
| Topic | Happiness |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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