Nature & Animals Quote by William Bennett

Happiness, Bennett suggests, is not a prize you can summon on command; it is the byproduct that shows up when you stop acting like you deserve it. The cat metaphor does a lot of quiet ideological work. Cats don’t respond to pleading, and they punish neediness with distance. So the image flatters a certain Protestant-inflected temperament: self-control, modest expectations, attention to duty. Go about your business, keep your hands busy, and the good feeling arrives almost as a reward for not asking.

That’s the subtext: happiness is framed less as a right than as a kind of grace. You don’t chase it; you make yourself the kind of person it might choose. In a political register, that aligns neatly with Bennett’s public brand as a moralist of late-20th-century conservatism, where personal virtue and discipline are offered as answers to social disorder. The line quietly argues against therapeutic culture’s promise of emotional optimization. Trying to “coax” happiness reads as indulgent, even faintly desperate.

The rhetoric works because it shifts the problem from the world to the seeker. If you’re unhappy, the implied critique isn’t that your circumstances are unjust; it’s that your posture toward happiness is wrong. That’s both comforting and constraining. Comforting, because it returns agency to the individual: change your attention, change your life. Constraining, because it can launder structural pain into a lesson about attitude, turning the absence of happiness into a personal failure to “go about your business.”