Wit & Attitude Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line has the tidy cruelty of a diagnosis: happiness, that supposedly sacred modern pursuit, is often just what people start measuring when they’re unwell or unmoored. Give someone “health and a course to steer” and the whole self-surveillance industry collapses. You don’t ask if you’re happy when your body isn’t bargaining with you and your days contain a direction that makes sense.

The intent isn’t sentimental; it’s corrective. Shaw, the dramatist who loved puncturing polite illusions, treats happiness less like a destination than a symptom report. The phrasing is slyly paternalistic: “Give a man…” as if society can administer two essentials the way a doctor prescribes rest and routine. That’s the subtext, too: what passes for existential angst is frequently structural. Provide material stability (health) and moral or vocational purpose (“a course to steer”), and the question “Am I happy?” becomes irrelevant, even faintly narcissistic.

Context matters. Shaw wrote in an era when industrial life reorganized time, work, and identity, and when “happiness” began to sound like a consumer promise rather than a philosophical problem. His theater skewered the self-deceptions of respectable society; here he skewers the inward turn itself. The real barb is that happiness isn’t a heroic inner conquest. It’s the byproduct of a body that works and a life that points somewhere. The quote lands because it refuses the audience the comfort of introspective drama and hands them something more practical: fix the conditions, and the mood will follow.