Happiness Quote by Ogden Nash

Nash’s joke lands because it flatters your moral aspirations while quietly sawing through them. “Only one way” is the salesman’s pitch of self-help certainty, then he swerves into an ethics trap: happiness comes from virtue (a “clear conscience”) or from the total absence of conscience. The punchline isn’t that morality is optional; it’s that guilt is expensive. Nash treats conscience less like a sacred inner compass and more like a psychological tax you either pay in full or evade entirely.

The wording does extra work. “Terrestrial ball” is mock-grand, a cartoonish globe that shrinks human seriousness down to a comedic prop. It’s also a subtle cue that this isn’t theology or philosophy; it’s social observation. The joke belongs to a 20th-century American mood where respectability, propriety, and constant self-monitoring were rising features of middle-class life. Nash, a master of light verse, uses that lightness to smuggle in a bleak thought: people don’t suffer because they do wrong; they suffer because they know it.

The subtext stings because it’s recognizably true in miniature. The happiest scoundrel isn’t the one who rationalizes; it’s the one who doesn’t need to. Nash’s cynicism isn’t aimless, though. By making “clear conscience” share a podium with “none at all,” he forces the reader to notice how often our moral life is motivated less by goodness than by the desire to sleep at night.