“4667. The more, the merrier; the fewer, the better Cheer.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
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Thomas Fuller (writer) 420
British physician, preacher, and intellectual 1654–1734Related quotes
“So is cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more remains.”
As quoted in "The Joking Troubadour of Gloom" in The Daily Telegraph (26 April 1993) http://www.webheights.net/speakingcohen/feb93.htm
Context: I am so often accused of gloominess and melancholy. And I think I'm probably the most cheerful man around. I don't consider myself a pessimist at all. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel completely soaked to the skin. … I think those descriptions of me are quite inappropriate to the gravity of the predicament that faces us all. I've always been free from hope. It's never been one of my great solaces. I feel that more and more we're invited to make ourselves strong and cheerful..... I think that it was Ben Jonson who said, I have studied all the theologies and all the philosophies, but cheerfulness keeps breaking through.
The Sixteenth Revelation, Chapter 72
Context: Ever the more clearly that the soul seeth this Blissful Cheer by grace of loving, the more it longeth to see it in fulness. For notwithstanding that our Lord God dwelleth in us and is here with us, and albeit He claspeth us and encloseth us for tender love that He may never leave us, and is more near to us than tongue can tell or heart can think, yet may we never stint of moaning nor of weeping nor of longing till when we see Him clearly in His Blissful Countenance. For in that precious blissful sight there may no woe abide, nor any weal fail.
“Cheer the bull, or cheer the bear; cheer both, and you will be trampled and eaten.”
Old saying in Randland
(15 October 1994)
“Childhood itself is scarcely more lovely than a cheerful, kind, sunshiny old age.”
1840s, Letters from New York (1843)
Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/66/12266.html, vol. 1, letter 37
During the Los Angeles performance of "The Wall" at the Los Angeles Arena, California, February 1980
Miscellaneous
“To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.”
On the Seventieth Birthday of Julia Ward Howe (May 27, 1899); reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.”
Almost certainly attributable to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who is, in various sources, credited with having said this in letters to Harriet Beecher Stowe (who turned 70 in 1881) and Julia Ward Howe (who turned 70 in 1889), as well as having made the commented about himself. Holmes, Sr. reached the age of 70 in 1879, while Holmes, Jr. reached that age in 1911, some time after the earliest reports of this quote.
Misattributed
