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Smile Quotes

Shakespeare, Byron, Lord Chesterfield, John Cleese and Milton share the top. Because the topic takes in laughter, the sourced material is dry. Bierce, in 1911, defines laughter as an interior convulsion producing a distortion of the features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. Mencken, in 1949, defines a creator as a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh. Einstein, in 1953, warns that whoever sets himself up as a judge of truth is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Three popular lines are marked misattributed. “A day without laughter is a day wasted” is credited to Charlie Chaplin, and the notes quote an older and longer passage making the same point. “Remember me with smiles and laughter” is credited to Laura Ingalls Wilder, and a poem about the thing that goes the farthest toward making life worthwhile, a smile, to Wilbur D. Nesbit.

Random quote on Smile

Most quoted on smile:

Laugh, and be fat, sir, your penance is known.
They that love mirth, let them heartily drink,
'Tis the only receipt to make sorrow sink.

Ben Jonson

Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee
Jest, and youthful jollity,
Quips and cranks and wanton wiles,
Nods and becks and wreathèd smiles.

John Milton L'Allegro (1631)

You can tell
By the laugh in the dark
at the sound of the bell
You can tell
It's the nucleus burning
inside of the cell…

Aimee Mann

Low gurgling laughter, as sweet
As the swallow's song i' the South,
And a ripple of dimples that, dancing, meet
By the curves of a perfect mouth

Paul Hamilton Hayne Poems (1882)

The smile that flickers on baby's lips when he sleeps — does anybody know where it was born? Yes, there is a rumor that a young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born in the dream of a dew-washed morning.

Rabindranath Tagore Gitanjali (1912)

Whence that three-cornered smile of bliss?
Three angels gave me at once a kiss.

George MacDonald

Maybe they [women who were executed by the Taliban] were guilty of the worst of all crimes: to laugh. Yes. Laughing. I said laughter. Didn't you know that with the Taliban in Afghanistan women can't laugh, that they are even forbidden to laugh?.

Oriana Fallaci The Rage and the Pride (2002)

The landlord's laugh was ready chorus.

Robert Burns Tam o' Shanter (1790)

I'm struck by how laughter connects you with people. It's almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you're just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy.

John Cleese

My tables,—meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark.

William Shakespeare

Laugh not too much; the witty man laughs least:
For wit is news only to ignorance.
Lesse at thine own things laugh; lest in the jest
Thy person share, and the conceit advance.

George Herbert The Temple (1633)

Laughter, n. An interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious and, though intermittent, incurable.

Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Those happy smilets,
That play'd on her ripe lip, seem'd not to know
What guests were in her eyes; which parted thence,
As pearls from diamonds dropp'd.

William Shakespeare King Lear (1608)

Laugh at your friends, and if your friends are sore;
So much the better, you may laugh the more.

Alexander Pope

To laugh were want of goodness and of grace;
And to be grave, exceeds all pow'r of face.

Alexander Pope

So much of 'normal, civilized' life is bull that you can't imagine. … What frightens you, doesn't frighten me, what frightens me, you'd laugh at.

James Clavell Noble House (1981)

That, in the midst of our daily struggle from birth to death, mankind should ever have conceived such things as laughter or beauty or goodness appears to me a far more marvellous thing than the finest supernatural miracle ever invented by all the mythologies.

Henry Nevinson

Thanks to globalization, new technologies and social networks, we know that what makes us laugh or saddens us, causes exactly the same reaction on the other side of the world.

Ángel Boligán Interview (2022)

Your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug,—push it a little—crowd it a little—weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.

Mark Twain

Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away;
A single laugh demolished the right arm
Of his own country;—seldom since that day
Has Spain had heroes.

Lord Byron

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