Daily Inspiration Quote by Cyril Tourneur

Joy slips in as an accomplice, not a prize, and Tourneur’s “subtle elf” framing is doing more than quaint personification. An elf is quick, mischievous, hard to pin down; you don’t summon it with a checklist. In early modern drama, where desire is often a trap and self-knowledge can curdle into paranoia, that’s a pointed psychology: the more tightly you grip at happiness, the more it wriggles free. The line’s elegance is its sideways move. Instead of praising joy as a reward for virtue or success, it casts joy as something you experience almost accidentally, as if the mind has to be distracted out of its own surveillance.

“Forget himself” carries a darker subtext in Tourneur’s world. His plays trade in masks, courtly performance, and the corrosive self-consciousness of ambition. To forget oneself isn’t just to relax; it’s to step out of the ego’s constant accounting: status, grievance, sexual jealousy, moral scorekeeping. That’s why the sentence pivots on “I think,” a modest hedge that reads like stagecraft. It’s an aside that feels intimate, but also defensive, as if the speaker knows how easily “happiness” becomes a suspect emotion in a culture trained to read motives and plots.

The line lands because it makes joy feel both real and precarious. It suggests happiness is less a possession than a momentary release from the self as protagonist, a brief holiday from the cramped theater of introspection.