Happiness Quote by Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Restless motion is a political virtue until it becomes a private vice. Bulwer-Lytton’s line needles the romantic fantasy of escape: the idea that happiness waits one train ride, one promotion, one reinvention away. Instead, he argues for a “narrow compass,” a deliberately unglamorous image that shrinks the map of fulfillment down to what’s already in hand. The phrasing is a corrective to wanderlust culture before wanderlust culture existed: whatever distances we rack up, the payoff rarely scales with the mileage.

The rhetoric works by letting “wandering” keep its dignity. He doesn’t condemn ambition or curiosity; he demotes them. The sentence grants the impulse to roam - “what ever our wandering” - then quietly undercuts it with the colder certainty of “will always.” That absolute is the point: happiness isn’t a frontier, it’s a practice of attention. “In the middle of the objects more immediately within our reach” shifts the focus from some abstract inner serenity to the plain, tangible stuff of a life: people, duties, familiar rooms, manageable responsibilities. It’s almost anti-heroic.

Context matters: Bulwer-Lytton was both a novelist of high melodrama and a working politician in an era of industrial acceleration, imperial horizons, and social churn. Against that backdrop, the sentence reads like a conservative emotional policy: anchor yourself, resist the intoxicating promise of elsewhere, and you’ll be harder to manipulate - by markets, by status competitions, by grand national narratives that monetize dissatisfaction. Happiness, he implies, is not discovered. It’s kept.