Care to our coffin adds a nail, no doubt;
And every grin, so merry, draws one out.John Wolcot (1738-1819) English satirist (pseud. Peter Pindar)
Expostulatory Odes to a Great Duke and a Little Lord, Ode 15, ll. 5-6 (1789)
(Source)
Quotations about:
good humor
Note not all quotations have been tagged, so Search may find additional quotes on this topic.
No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) Scottish essayist and historian
Sartor Resartus, Book 1, ch. 4 (1831)
(Source)
Cheer up, the worst is yet to come.
Philander Johnson (1866-1939) American journalist, humorist, lyricist, playwright
“The Colyumist’s Confessional,” Everybody’s Magazine (May 1920)
(Source)
He refers to the phrase as a "rather unfeeling invitation to end a hard-luck story."
Life is like fording a river, stepping from one slippery stone to another, and you must rejoice every time you don’t lose your balance, and learn to laugh at all the times you do.
Merle Shain (1935-1989) Canadian journalist and author
(Attributed)
How easy it is to be amiable in the midst of happiness and success!
Anne Sophie Swetchine (1782-1857) Russian-French author and salonist [Madame Swetchine]
Life and Letters of Madam Swetchine, ch. 5 [8th ed., 1875] (ed. de Falloux; tr. Preston]
(Source)
Good humor may be said to be one of the very best articles of dress one can wear in society.
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) English novelist
Sketches and Travels in London, “On Tailoring — and Toilets in General” (1856)
I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The latter I consider as an act, the former as an habit of mind. Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness fixed and permanent. Those are often raised into the greatest transports of mirth who are subject to the greatest depressions of melancholy. On the contrary, cheerfulness, though it does not give the mind such an exquisite gladness, prevents us from falling into any depths of sorrow. Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.
Joseph Addison (1672-1719) English essayist, poet, statesman
The Spectator, #381, “Cheerfulness and Mirth” (17 May 1712)
(Source)
A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition.
Charles Caleb "C. C." Colton (1780-1832) English cleric, writer, aphorist
Lacon: or, Many Things in Few Words, #202 (1821 ed.)
Even in common people, conceit has the virtue of making them cheerful; the man who thinks his wife, his baby, his house, his horse, his dog, and himself severally unequalled, is almost sure to be a good-humored person, though liable to be tedious at times.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894) American poet, essayist, scholar
“The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” Atlantic Monthly (1857-11)
Collected in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, ch. 1 (1858)
A man without mirth is like a waggon without springs, in which one is caused disagreeably to jolt by every pebble over which it runs. A man with mirth is like a chariot with springs, in which one can ride over the roughest road, and scarcely feel anything but a pleasant rocking motion.
Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) American clergyman and orator
Royal Truths (1862)
(Source)
Frequently rendered, but unsourced in this form:
A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It's jolted by every pebble on the road.
In Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, "The Human Mind" [ed. Drysdale (1887)], Beecher is recorded similarly saying:
A practical, matter-of-fact man is like a wagon without springs: every single pebble on the road jolts him; but a man with imagination has springs that break the jar and jolt.
The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) English writer and churchman
Polite Conversation, Dialog 2 (1738)
Borrowed / popularized from William Bullein, Government of Health, folio 50 (1558): "The first was called doctor diet, the seconde doctor quiet, the thirde doctor merry-man." (1558)
Always laugh when you can; it is cheap medicine.
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) English poet
(Attributed)
Widely attributed to Byron, but no source cited.
Mirth is God’s medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in it. Grim care, moroseness, anxiety — all this rust of life ought to be scoured off by the oil of mirth. It is better than emery. Every man ought to rub himself with it.