Happiness Quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hawthorne’s line delivers a Puritan-era warning disguised as self-help: don’t stare directly at pleasure, or it evaporates. The sentence structure is the tell. “When it comes, comes incidentally” doubles down on accident, as if happiness is less a prize than a side effect, like smoke from a fire you weren’t trying to start. Then he snaps the trap shut with “wild-goose chase,” a phrase that makes striving look faintly ridiculous: frantic, aimless, performative. You can almost hear him mocking the modern instinct to optimize the soul.

The subtext is moral, not merely psychological. Hawthorne writes from a culture suspicious of indulgence and keenly aware of self-deception. In his fiction, characters who try to force purity, certainty, or fulfillment often end up warped by the effort. So “some other object” isn’t an invitation to distraction; it’s a proposal for vocation, duty, craft, or devotion - something that can justify itself even when it’s hard. Happiness becomes an unearned dividend rather than a personal entitlement.

The rhetoric is also quietly radical in a capitalist key. It refuses the transactional fantasy that you can invest effort and reliably withdraw joy. Hawthorne implies that chasing happiness makes you treat life like a market, constantly checking the return. His alternative is almost anti-metric: lose yourself in meaning, and happiness might arrive “without dreaming of it” - the only kind that can’t be sabotaged by self-monitoring.