One’s happiness depends less on what he knows than on what he feels.

Bailey contrasts intellectual attainment with emotional life, suggesting that well-being is shaped more by one’s affective orientation—gratitude, wonder, contentment, sympathy—than by the mere accumulation of facts. The line reflects a humanistic, experience-centered view often associated with educators and nature writers: knowledge can inform and empower, but it does not automatically confer joy. Happiness, in this framing, depends on the quality of one’s inner responses to the world and to others. The quote also implies a critique of purely cerebral ideals of “success,” urging cultivation of feeling—sensibility, appreciation, and moral sentiment—as a necessary complement to learning.