This is one of the most shared happiness quotes in the world, and it travels under two famous names — usually Henry David Thoreau, sometimes Nathaniel Hawthorne. Here's the twist worth knowing: almost certainly neither of them wrote it.

According to the research site Quote Investigator, the earliest known version appeared in 1848 in a New Orleans newspaper, The Daily Crescent, credited only to a mysterious writer signing as "L." The Thoreau attribution is a modern invention that gathered steam online around 2012, riding a wave of pretty illustrated versions. The Hawthorne link is a separate confusion — he did write a genuine (and quite different) line about happiness coming "incidentally" when you stop chasing it, and over time the two got braided together.

None of which makes the image any less lovely — and the image is the whole reason it endures. Happiness, it suggests, behaves like a butterfly: chase it directly, lunging and grasping, and it flits maddeningly out of reach. But get quietly absorbed in something else — good work, good company, a task you care about — and it may drift over and settle on your shoulder when you weren't even looking.

Psychologists have a name for the trap it describes: the harder you monitor yourself for "Am I happy yet?", the more happiness tends to recede, because the anxious checking is itself the opposite of contentment. Happiness so often turns out to be a by-product — of absorption, connection, and purpose — rather than something you can seize head-on. Whoever "L" was, in 1848, they'd already figured that out. Enjoy the butterfly — just don't chase the wrong author, or the happiness, too hard.