Happiness Quote by Florenz Ziegfeld

A Ziegfeld line like this is Broadway’s champagne bubble with a pinprick hidden inside. He offers a benediction on “earning a livelihood” and “comfortable home living,” but the phrasing is carefully conditional: “Let us hope” doesn’t promise; it manages expectations. Coming from a producer who built careers (and fantasies) out of chorus lines and glamour, it reads less like moral advice than a backstage aside about what happens after the spotlight stops paying.

The subtext is bluntly transactional. Work may buy a certain kind of peace - rent paid, furniture bought, respectability performed - yet it doesn’t buy the end of difficulty, especially “for her.” That pronoun matters. Ziegfeld’s world sold a polished image of womanhood: beauty, novelty, poise, and “home living” as the respectable endpoint. He nods to that narrative (“honestly earned”) while quietly admitting the grind doesn’t end when the paycheck arrives or when the public decides you’ve made it.

Contextually, this sits in an early 20th-century entertainment economy where women’s labor was highly visible, heavily judged, and often precarious. A producer’s optimism doubles as a warning label: the industry can elevate you, but it will not protect you. The line’s power is its refusal to flatter the dream. It recognizes money as relief, not redemption - and treats “hard work” not as virtue signaling, but as the toll charged by both the market and the roles society expects her to keep playing.