Happiness Quote by George Eliot

Eliot refuses to flatter you with the modern promise that happiness is a baseline entitlement. Her sentence is a small act of Victorian realism: brace yourself, not because life is bleak for sport, but because depending on happiness as the main fuel for living is a fragile arrangement. The line carries the calm severity of someone who has watched good people do everything "right" and still meet disappointment, illness, bad timing, and social constraint.

The craft is in the pivot: "Whether happiness may come or not" admits contingency, then denies it the power to govern your inner posture. Eliot isn't praising misery or selling stoicism as a badge; she's warning against the emotional debt that forms when you treat happiness as something you're owed. "Prepare one's self" implies training, not resignation: habits, duties, loyalties, and moral attention that keep functioning when the mood doesn't show up.

Read in Eliot's context, it lands as a critique of both romantic fantasy and the era's self-helpish moralism. Her novels are crowded with characters who mistake intensity for destiny and then crash into the ordinary consequences of choice. The subtext is ethical: if your capacity for decency depends on feeling good, you're unreliable. Eliot suggests a sturdier kind of freedom - not the freedom to be happy, but the freedom to act well even when you're not.