Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was a French novelist and poet, author of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. His opposition to Napoleon III kept him in exile in the Channel Islands for nearly twenty years. He campaigned against the death penalty, and more than a million people attended his funeral in Paris.
About this theme: Happiness
Few subjects have been written about so much with so little agreement. For Aristotle happiness was not a feeling but a way of living — eudaimonia, visible only when a life is viewed whole. For the Epicureans it was the absence of disturbance. For the Stoics it was a consequence of virtue and never a target. None of these is the same as being in a good mood, yet that substitution is the one most often made.
More by Victor Hugo
More on Happiness
- The earth laughs in flowers.— Ralph Waldo Emerson
- True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future.— Seneca
- He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.— Lao Tzu
- Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.— Epictetus
- He is richest who is content with the least.— Socrates