Life & Wisdom Quote by Lord Byron

Byron turns the marriage plot inside out with a grin sharp enough to draw blood. “Of course” is doing the heavy lifting: he treats misery not as an accident but as the predictable price of entering the social machine that promises “happiness.” The line works because it borrows the diction of bourgeois aspiration - pursuit, happiness, the neat little program of a stable life - then punctures it with the lived weather of a Romantic temperament. It’s a wedding announcement written like a self-satire.

The intent is double. On the surface, he’s tossing off a joke about pre-wedding nerves. Underneath, he’s indicting the era’s moral accounting, where marriage is marketed as fulfillment and enforced as respectability. Byron, the celebrity poet with a talent for scandal, understands that the “pursuit of happiness” can be its own trap: once happiness becomes a goal you chase, you start measuring yourself against a script. Misery follows not because happiness is impossible, but because trying to obtain it on demand turns desire into labor and intimacy into a performance.

Context matters. Byron’s personal life made marriage less a romantic culmination than a public negotiation - reputation management, family expectations, money, scrutiny. The irony lands because he’s both participant and critic: he steps into the institution while telegraphing his skepticism about it. That tension is the Byronic signature: a man smart enough to see the con, vain enough to think he can beat it, and honest enough to admit the con still hurts.