Daily Inspiration Quote by Daphne du Maurier

Du Maurier’s line quietly sabotages the consumer logic that so often colonizes our inner life. “Possession” is a pointed word: it conjures property, trophies, the idea that happiness can be acquired, stored, defended. By rejecting that framing, she isn’t offering a soft self-help platitude; she’s stripping happiness of its market value. If it can’t be “prized,” it can’t be used to prove you’ve won at life. That’s the sting.

The sentence works because it is both demotion and liberation. Demotion, because it refuses to elevate happiness into a sacred object that justifies desperate striving. Liberation, because it relocates happiness somewhere less vulnerable to the world’s volatility: “a quality of thought.” Not an event, not a permanent condition, not an external verdict. A practice. Something nearer to attention, interpretation, the story you tell yourself about what’s happening. The phrase “state of mind” lands like a final lock on the door: happiness is less a destination than a mental weather system you can learn to read.

Context matters. Du Maurier wrote novels steeped in atmosphere, dread, and the unstable boundary between perception and reality. In her world, what ruins people isn’t only what happens to them; it’s how fear, longing, and obsession distort the lens. This quote carries that novelist’s skepticism: the mind is powerful enough to manufacture both paradise and prison. Happiness, she implies, isn’t a prize at the end of plot. It’s an editing choice made in real time.