Life & Wisdom Quote by Alice Meynell

Meynell slips a quiet revolution into a sentence that reads like consolation. In a culture (and a century) that loved to moralize feeling, she refuses the obvious storyline: good life equals good luck. “Not a matter of events” is a bracing demotion of the external world, a way of puncturing the Victorian habit of treating happiness as the deserved prize of propriety, marriage, money, or “right living.” She doesn’t deny events hurt; she denies they get the last word.

The real work happens in her metaphor. “Tides of the mind” is not the sunny language of willpower. Tides are cyclical, bodily, and partly beyond command; they arrive, withdraw, return. That image smuggles in a proto-psychological realism: moods have weather, and the self is an environment, not a machine. It also carries a poet’s suspicion of neat causality. If happiness “depends” on tides, then chasing it by rearranging circumstances is like trying to bribe the ocean.

Subtextually, the line pushes back against the era’s stiff emotional etiquette, especially for women, who were expected to present cheerfulness as social proof of gratitude and virtue. By relocating happiness inside, Meynell grants privacy to feeling and complexity to inner life. At the same time, she hints at peril: if happiness is internal, suffering can be misread as personal failure. The phrase holds that tension elegantly. It offers agency, but not total control; it’s an argument for attention, not optimism.