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Mirth      Page 1 of 6

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Related Topic(s): Defeat; Jesting; Men Women

WHEN HELEN LIVED

We have cried in our despair
That men desert,
For some trivial affair
Or noisy, insolent sport,
Beauty that we have won
From bitterest hours;
Yet we, had we walked within
Those topless towers
Where Helen walked with her boy,
Had given but as the rest
Of the men and women of Troy,
A word and a jest.
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W.B. Yeats William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, County Dublin, Ireland. His father, John Butler Yeats, was a descendant of Jervis Yeats, a Williamite soldier and linen merchant who died in 1712. Jervis' grandson Benjamin married Mary Butler, daughter of a landed family in County Kildare. At the time of his marriage, John Yeats was studying law but abandoned his studies to study art at Heatherley"�s Art School in London. His mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen, came from a wealthy Anglo-Irish family in County Sligo who owned a prosperous milling and shipping business. Soon after William's birth the family relocated to Sligo to stay with her extended family, and the young poet came to think of the area as his childhood and spiritual home. Its landscape became, over time, both literally and symbolically, his "country of the heart". The Butler Yeats family were highly artistic; his brother Jack went on to be a highly regarded painter, while his sisters Elizabeth and Susan Mary""known to family and friends as Lollie and Lily""became involved in the Arts and Crafts movement.

Yeats grew up as a member of the former Protestant Ascendancy at the time undergoing a crisis of identity. While his family was broadly supportive of the changes Ireland was experiencing, the nationalist revival of the late 19th century directly disadvantaged his heritage, and informed his outlook for the remainder of his life. In 1997, his biographer R. F. Foster observed that Napoleon's dictum that to understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty "is manifestly true of W.B.Y." Yeats's childhood and young adulthood were shadowed by the power shift away from the minority Protestant Ascendancy. The 1880s saw the rise of Parnell and the Home rule movement, the 1890s the momentum of nationalism, while the Catholics became prominent around the turn of the century. These developments were to have a profound effect on his poetry, and his subsequent explorations of Irish identity had a significant influence on the creation of his country's biography.[10]




1907 Portrait by Augustus John

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Related Topic(s): Action; Influence; Laughter; Politics; Power; Satire; Vote

The man who can make others laugh secures more votes for a measure than the man who forces them to think.

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Malcolm De Chazal

Related Topic(s): Fun; Happiness; Laughter

'Tis a good thing to laugh at any rate; and if a straw can tickle a man, it is an instrument of happiness.

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Dryden

Related Topic(s): Laughter

...the mental condition of which laughter is the expression is something which it behooves the student of human nature and the student of national traits to understand very clearly.

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Agnes Repplier

Related Topic(s): Cheerful; Laughter; Satire

A good laugh is sunshine in a house.

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Thackeray

Related Topic(s): Laughter

A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market

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Charles Lamb Charles Lamb was an English essayist, best known for his Essays of Elia and for the children's book Tales from Shakespeare, which he produced with his sister, Mary Lamb (1764–1847). Lamb has been referred to by E.V. Lucas, his principal biographer, as the most lovable figure in English literature, and his influence on the English essay form surely cannot be overestimated. (Wikipedia)

Related Topic(s): Heart; Joy; Laughter

A laugh to be joyous must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness there can be no true joy.

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Carlyle

Related Topic(s): Laughter

A laughing mouth doth all of its teeth display.

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Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 - 22 May 1885) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France.

In France, Hugo's literary fame comes first from his poetry but also rests upon his novels and his dramatic achievements. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem, and Hugo is sometimes identified as the greatest French poet. Outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (also known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame).

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Related Topic(s): Laughter

A man isn't poor if he can still laugh.

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Raymond Hitchcock

Related Topic(s): Laughter

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

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Mark Twain

Related Topic(s): Anger; Depression; Joy; Laughter; Practice; Sadness; Screaming

As practice is requisite with the ordinary movements of the body, such as walking, so it seems to be with laughing and weeping. The art of screaming, on the other hand, from being of service to infants, has become finely developed from the earliest days.

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Charles Darwin

Related Topic(s): ART; Crying; Emotions; Faces; Laughing; Laughter

Between the expressions of laughter and weeping there is no difference in the motion of the features, either in the eyes, mouth or cheeks; only in the ruffling of the brows, which is added when weeping, but more elevated and extended when laughing.
...Those who weep, raise the brows, and bring them close together above the nose, forming many wrinkles on the forehead, and the corners of the mouth are turned down-wards. Those who laugh have them tu...
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Leonardo Davinci

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci April 1452 May 1519), more commonly Leonardo da Vinci or simply Leonardo, was an Italian Renaissance polymath whose areas of interest included invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography. He has been variously called the father of palaeontology, ichnology, and architecture, and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time. Sometimes credited with the inventions of the parachute, helicopter and tank, he epitomised the Renaissance humanist ideal.

Many historians and scholars regard Leonardo as the prime exemplar of the "Universal Genius" or "Renaissance Man", an individual of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination". According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent in recorded history, and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, while the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci notes that while there is much speculation regarding his life and personality, his view of the world was logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unorthodox for his time.

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Related Topic(s): Laughter; Smile

Care to our coffin adds a nail, no doubt; And every grin so merry, draws one out.

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Peter Pindar

Related Topic(s): Laughter

Cheerfulness is always to be supported if a man is out of pain, but mirth to a prudent man should always be accidental.
It should naturally arise out of the occasion, and the occasion seldom be laid for it; for those tempers who want mirth to be pleased, are like the constitutions which flag without the use of brandy. Therefore, I say, let your precept be, ||be easy. That mind is dissolute and ungoverned, which must be hurried out of itself by lo...
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Steele

Related Topic(s): Laughter

Every new time will give its law.

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Maxim Gorky

Related Topic(s): Laughter

Find expression for a sorrow and it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy, and you intensify its ecstasy.

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Oscar Wilde Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 - 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and the tragedy of his imprisonment, followed by his early death.

Wilde's parents were successful Dublin intellectuals, and their son showed his intelligence early, becoming fluent in French and German. At university Wilde read Greats, and proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. However, he became known for his involvement in the rising philosophy of aestheticism (led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin) though he also profoundly explored Roman Catholicism (and later converted on his deathbed). After university Wilde moved to London, into fashionable cultural and social circles. As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities; he published a book of poems, lectured America and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art" and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversation, Wilde had become one of the major personalities of his day.

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Related Topic(s): Laughter

He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh.

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The Koran

Related Topic(s): Laughter

He laughs best who laughs last.

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English Proverb

Related Topic(s): Laughter

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cavemen had known how to laugh, History would have been different.

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Oscar Wilde Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 - 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and the tragedy of his imprisonment, followed by his early death.

Wilde's parents were successful Dublin intellectuals, and their son showed his intelligence early, becoming fluent in French and German. At university Wilde read Greats, and proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. However, he became known for his involvement in the rising philosophy of aestheticism (led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin) though he also profoundly explored Roman Catholicism (and later converted on his deathbed). After university Wilde moved to London, into fashionable cultural and social circles. As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities; he published a book of poems, lectured America and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art" and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversation, Wilde had become one of the major personalities of his day.

Author Information from Wikipedia

Related Topic(s): Laughter

Humour may be the last sanctuary of perspective when we take ourselves too seriously.

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Deb K Carlen

 

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