Happiness Quote by Samuel Johnson

Happiness, Johnson suggests, is less a destination than a mirage we manufacture to keep moving. The line has the dry snap of an 18th-century moralist who’s seen enough dinner-table ambition to know how the story ends: we don’t crave the new life so much as we crave the feeling that a new life is about to begin. Anticipation is the drug; the “change itself” is the hangover.

What makes the sentence work is its trapdoor structure. It starts with a grand, almost biblical sweep (“Such is the state of life”), then tightens into a clinical diagnosis of desire. Johnson isn’t romanticizing restlessness; he’s indicting it as a built-in feature of human psychology, a machine that converts every achievement into the raw material for the next dissatisfaction. The pivot - “the change itself is nothing” - is deliberately deflating, a puncture to the pride we take in our turning points. Even transformation, once completed, becomes just another possession, instantly familiar, instantly unable to deliver what we secretly wanted from it: permanent relief from wanting.

The subtext carries Johnson’s broader suspicion of novelty and self-deception, a theme consistent with a writer steeped in Christian-inflected stoicism and a London culture of upward striving. It’s also a proto-modern critique of what we’d now call hedonic adaptation: the treadmill disguised as progress. Johnson’s real target isn’t change; it’s the fantasy that the next rearrangement of circumstances will finally quiet the mind.