The highest happiness on earth is marriage.

Taken at face value, Phelps’s line elevates marriage from a social institution to a moral and emotional summit: the “highest” form of earthly happiness is found not in fame, wealth, or solitary achievement but in a committed partnership. The phrasing implies a hierarchy of satisfactions and frames marriage as uniquely capable of providing enduring joy—through companionship, mutual care, shared purpose, and the creation of a stable home. Read historically, it also reflects an early-20th-century Anglo-American ideal that treated marriage as the normative center of adult fulfillment. The statement’s absoluteness (“the highest”) invites debate: it can be read as prescriptive cultural rhetoric as much as personal conviction.