Daily Inspiration Quote by Ingrid Bergman

Bergman’s line lands with the clean snap of someone who’s lived through glamour and catastrophe and refuses to romanticize either. “Good health” is the unsexy baseline: not ambition, not money, not even love, but the body cooperating long enough for life to feel inhabitable. Coming from an actress whose public image was built on luminous poise while her private life was chewed up by scandal and relentless scrutiny, it reads like a survival tip smuggled into a joke.

The real bite is “a bad memory.” It’s not ignorance; it’s selective forgetting. Bergman is naming an emotional skill: the ability to shed the replay loop. For a woman who became a tabloid morality play after her affair with Rossellini, this is less self-help than self-defense. Memory is what the public weaponizes (old headlines, old sins), and what the self weaponizes too (regret, rumination). Calling a “bad memory” a component of happiness is a sly rebuke to the culture of permanent recordkeeping, decades before social media made that record feel inescapable.

The line also punctures the prestige idea that suffering must be curated and remembered to be meaningful. Bergman doesn’t deny pain; she suggests it shouldn’t get to be the narrator. There’s wit here, but not cruelty: happiness isn’t a grand achievement, it’s the modest privilege of waking up well and not letting yesterday keep filing appeals.