“You see, Wendy, when the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.”
Source: Peter and Wendy (1911), Ch. 3
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J. M. Barrie 49
Scottish writer 1860–1937Related quotes
“1936. He is not laughed at, that laughs at himself first.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“It went to pieces all at once—
All at once and nothing first,
Just as bubbles do when they burst.”
The Deacon's Masterpiece; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“It's time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.”
Source: Songs of Leonard Cohen, Herewith: Music, Words and Photographs
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Describing the stages of a winning strategy of nonviolent activism. There is no record of Gandhi saying this. A close variant of the quotation first appears in a 1918 US trade union address by Nicholas Klein:
:* And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you. And that, is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
::* Proceedings of the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (1918), p. 53 http://books.google.com/books?id=QrcpAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA53&dq=%22First+they+ignore+you%22
In Freedom's Battle (1922), Gandhi wrote this:
:* Unfortunately for His Excellency the movement is likely to grow with ridicule as it is certain to flourish on repression. No vital movement can be killed except by the impatience, ignorance or laziness of its authors. A movement cannot be 'insane' that is conducted by men of action as I claim the members of the Non-co-operation Committee are. … Ridicule is like repression. Both give place to respect when they fail to produce the intended effect. … It will be admitted that non-co-operation has passed the stage [of] ridicule. Whether it will now be met by repression or respect remains to be seen. … But the testing time has now arrived. In a civilized country when ridicule fails to kill a movement it begins to command respect.
::* Source: The Project Gutenberg EBook of Freedom's Battle, 2nd edition, by Mahatma Gandhi, 1922 http://www.gutenberg.net/1/0/3/6/10366/10366-h/10366-h.htm
Misattributed
“When a devil, but also a saint, laughs about your poetry, you laugh about his ignorance!”
Donna Giovanna, Act IV, scene iii.
“Time to live, time to lie, time to laugh, and time to die. Take it easy baby. Take it as it comes.”