Happiness Quote by Audrey Hepburn

Hepburn’s line lands like a cocktail-party laugh that turns, mid-sip, into a survival strategy. “Health and a short memory” is deliberately unglamorous for someone so frequently packaged as elegance incarnate. It pulls happiness out of the realm of aspiration and into the body: if you can get out of bed without pain, you’re already ahead. That first word, “health,” quietly rejects the fantasy that joy is primarily a mindset; it’s a material condition, and she’s candid enough to admit it.

The “short memory” is where the charm sharpens. It’s not an endorsement of stupidity or denial so much as a permission slip to stop auditioning your past for fresh evidence of failure. Hepburn frames forgetfulness as an active discipline: edit the reel, cut the scenes that keep looping. There’s a moral subtext, too, because “short memory” can mean not only letting go of personal hurts but also refusing the addictive grievance economy that makes misery feel righteous.

“I wish I’d invented it” signals her show-business savvy. She knows good lines travel farther than good intentions, and she’s generous enough to credit the anonymous author while borrowing the aphorism’s authority. Coming from someone whose public image was crafted under intense scrutiny - and whose life included war-time trauma and later humanitarian work - the quip reads as earned pragmatism. It’s a small, portable philosophy for people who can’t afford grand ones: protect your body, prune your story, keep moving.