Happiness Quote by Don Marquis

Marquis turns “fate” into a dryly amused stage manager: it hands you the props for a good life, then leans back to watch you botch the performance. The line isn’t motivational; it’s a sardonic diagnosis. By framing happiness and prosperity as “material,” he reduces them to mere raw supplies, not finished products. The sting is in the implication that most misery isn’t imported by tragedy but manufactured in-house, assembled from anxieties, ego, and bad habits using perfectly adequate ingredients.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to two popular alibis: that suffering is purely circumstantial, and that success automatically delivers contentment. Marquis implies the opposite: favorable circumstances can become a more elaborate playground for self-sabotage. Give someone security and they may spend it on worry. Give them opportunity and they may convert it into comparison. “Just to see” sharpens the cynicism, as if fate isn’t cruel so much as curious about the human talent for turning gifts into grievances.

As a journalist in early 20th-century America, Marquis lived amid a booming culture of self-making and boosterish optimism, where prosperity was increasingly marketed as a moral achievement. His sentence punctures that sales pitch without drifting into despair. It’s funny because it’s uncomfortably plausible: the joke lands on the reader’s recognition that the “material” is often already in our hands, and the misery, too, is partly our own craftsmanship.