1.
In all thy humours, whether grave or mellow, Thou'rt such a touchy, testy, pleasant fellow, Hast so much wit and mirth and spleen about thee, There is no living with thee, nor without thee.
Joseph Addison
2.
Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.
Edith Wharton
3.
Luck often raises vulgarity to a high position, to create mirth for the beholders.
Juvenal
5.
Man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.
Joseph Addison
6.
She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.
Edith Wharton
7.
Keep company with the more cheerful sort of the Godly; there is no mirth like the mirth of believers.
Richard Baxter
8.
I never get any protests from children. All you get are giggles of mirth and squirms of delight. I know what children like.
Roald Dahl
9.
A companion that feasts the company with and mirth, and leaves out the sin which is usually mixed with them, he is the man; and let me tell you, good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue.
Izaak Walton
10.
Quick-circulating slanders mirth afford; and reputation bleeds in every word.
Charles Churchill
11.
Not by constraint or severity shall you have access to true wisdom, but by abandonment, and childlike mirth-fulness. If you would know aught, be gay before it.
Henry David Thoreau
14.
Meat eaten without either mirth or music is ill of digestion.
Walter Scott
15.
The raillery which is consistent with good-breeding is a gentle animadversion of some foible, which, while it raises the laugh in the rest of the company, doth not put the person rallied out of countenance, or expose him to shame or contempt. On the contrary, the jest should be so delicate that the object of it should be capable of joining in the mirth it occasions.
Henry Fielding
16.
Here come the lovers, full of joy and mirth.— Joy, gentle friends! joy and fresh days of love Accompany your hearts!
William Shakespeare
17.
The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience.
John Cage
19.
I have of late--but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth,
forgone all custom of exercise.
William Shakespeare
21.
The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world's mirth.
Agnes Repplier
24.
Who mix'd reason with pleasure, and wisdom with mirth: If he had any faults, he has left us in doubt.
Oliver Goldsmith
25.
There is not a string attuned to mirth but has its chord of melancholy.
Thomas Hood
26.
I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The latter I consider as an act, the former as a habit of mind. Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness fixed and permanent.
Joseph Addison
27.
The feelings that Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of a god. There was something olympian in his snarls and rages, and there was a touch of hellfire in his mirth.
H. L. Mencken
28.
Mirthfulness is in the mind and you cannot get it out. It is just as good in its place as conscience or veneration.
Henry Ward Beecher
29.
The clown may be the source of mirth, but - who shall make the clown laugh?
Angela Carter
30.
Jean Prouvaire was timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth, a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both laughing and lyric.
Victor Hugo
31.
I am very fond of Edith Wharton. She's quite high brow but also a great storyteller. My favorite is 'The House of Mirth.' I also like 'The Reef.
Ken Follett
32.
If you suppress the exorbitant love of pleasure and money, idle curiosity, iniquitous pursuits and wanton mirth, what a stillness would there be in the greatest cities.
Jean de la Bruyere
33.
Actually, there are countless ways to live upon this tremorous sphere in mirth and good health, and probably only one way - the industrial, urbanized, herding way - to live here stupidly, and man has hit upon that one way.
Tom Robbins
35.
Who buys a minute's mirth to wail a week? Or sell eternity to get a toy? For one grape who will the vine destroy?
William Shakespeare
37.
As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gaiety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
38.
He who, in questions of right, virtue, or duty, sets himself above all ridicule, is truly great, and shall laugh in the end with truer mirth than ever he was laughed at.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
39.
I remember, I remember how my childhood fleeted by. The mirth of its December, and the warmth of its July.
Winthrop Mackworth Praed
40.
Mirth itself is too often but melancholy in disguise.
Leigh Hunt
41.
The suburbs of folly is vain mirth, and profuseness of laughter is the city of fools.
Francis Quarles
42.
For me the motley and the bauble, yea,
Though all be vanity, as the Preacher saith,
The mirth of love be mine for one brief breath!
Frederic Lawrence Knowles
43.
Where lives the man that has not tried How mirth can into folly glide, And folly into sin!
Walter Scott
44.
When thou dost tell another's jest, therein Omit the oaths, which true wit cannot need; Pick out of tales the mirth, but not the sin.
George Herbert
45.
Man is the merriest species of the creation; all above or below him are serious.
Joseph Addison
46.
Cruelty in all countries is the companion of anger; but there is only one, and never was another on the globe, where she coquets both with anger and mirth.
Walter Savage Landor
47.
In truth it is best to learn wisdom, and abandoning all nonsense, to leave it to boys to enjoy their season of play and mirth.
Horace
48.
On this hapless earth There 's small sincerity of mirth, And laughter oft is but an art To drown the outcry of the heart.
Hartley Coleridge
49.
There is nothing which one regards so much with an eye of mirth and pity as innocence when it has in it a dash of folly.
Joseph Addison
50.
In anything that does cover the whole of your life - in your philosophy and your religion - you must have mirth. If you do not have mirth you will certainly have madness.
Gilbert K. Chesterton