Action may not always be happiness, but there is no happiness without action.

Disraeli’s aphorism draws a sharp distinction between action as a sufficient condition for happiness and action as a necessary one. Mere activity—ambition, labor, political striving—can be exhausting or even painful, and so “may not always be happiness.” Yet the second clause insists that happiness is not a passive state that arrives unbidden; it depends on agency: choosing, doing, engaging with the world, and accepting the risks of effort. The line fits a Victorian ethos that prizes energy, purpose, and self-fashioning, and it also serves as a corrective to sentimental or purely contemplative notions of contentment: joy is more often the byproduct of committed action than its substitute.