“What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but scattered along life's pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.”

— Joseph Addison

This appears as an anonymous proverb in Frank Leslie's Sunday Magazine Vol. XIII, (January - June 1883) edited by T. De Witt Talmage, and apparently only in recent years has it become attributed to Addison.
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Joseph Addison226

politician, writer and playwright 1672–1719

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

“Be an encourager. Scatter sunshine. Who knows whose life you might touch with something as simple as a kind word.”

Debbie Macomber (1948) American writer

“I wished for nothing beyond her smile, and to walk with her thus, hand in hand, along a sun warmed, flower bordered path.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

“As steals the dew along the flower,
So stole thy smile on me;
I cannot tell the day, nor hour
I first loved thee!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(1836-2) (Vol.47) Songs-IV.
The Monthly Magazine

“Only by presupposing God's prior and inconceivable forgiveness can the limitations of human good will be transcended, and only thus can the danger of human pride be avoided.”

Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1905–1988) Swedish Catholic theologian

Love Alone Is Credible (1963)

“And then he smiled at me, and he was Jeremiah again. Susannah’s boy, sunshine and smiles. Her little angel.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: It's Not Summer Without You

“What is all human conduct but the daily and hourly sale of our souls for trifles?”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

1900s, Major Barbara (1905)
Context: It is not the sale of my soul that troubles me: I have sold it too often to care about that. I have sold it for a professorship. I have sold it for an income. … What is all human conduct but the daily and hourly sale of our souls for trifles?

“Every man who becomes heartily and understandingly a channel of the Divine beneficence, is enriched through every league of his life. Perennial satisfaction springs around and within him with perennial verdure. Flowers of gratitude and gladness bloom all along his pathway, and the melodious gurgle of the blessings he bears is echoed back by the melodious waves of the recipient stream.”

Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819–1881) Novelist, poet, editor

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 26.

“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; —& they are the life, the soul of reading; — take them out of this book for instance, — you might as well take the book along with them.”

Laurence Sterne book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Book I, Ch. 22.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760-1767)

“Jealous of the actors now, are we?"
"What, of some fancy boy on the screen? Inconceivable."
Oh, this was going to be good.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Slays

“What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but scattered along life's pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.”

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