Happiness Quote by Robert Southwell

A smile that already contains the shadow of a frown is a very clerical kind of joy: disciplined, wary, and trained on the exit sign. Southwell turns Fortune into a coquettish woman, but the flirtation is a trap. If she can smile, she can withdraw it; if she can give, she can take. The wit is in the timing: he doesn’t wait for misfortune to instruct him. He “smile[s] to think” of the coming reversal, pre-loading gratitude with a memento mori. Pleasure becomes a rehearsal for loss.

That’s the subtext: worldly luck is not just unreliable, it’s spiritually dangerous because it tempts you to confuse comfort with truth. Southwell’s line isn’t depressive so much as tactical. By imagining the frown inside the smile, he denies Fortune the power of surprise. He also denies himself the narcotic of permanent security, a refusal that reads like a devotional practice: don’t clutch what can’t last.

Context sharpens the edge. Southwell was a Catholic priest in Elizabethan England, living under surveillance and ultimately executed. For someone whose life depended on the state’s mood, “Fortune” wasn’t an abstract wheel from medieval allegory; it was the daily volatility of power. His sentence compresses that lived precariousness into a spiritual posture: take any moment of ease as temporary, not because joy is suspect, but because attachment is. The line works because it converts anxiety into composure, turning foreknowledge of loss into a kind of freedom.