Ditto and Smile

The conscious man's smile surely is fake
How else can he with his weighty thoughts bear
The wide world's misery to which he's awake
And smile as if, it is all quite fair
I can only ditto what greats thus spake
Content that the answer is somewhere there

Had the cave man laughed, history would have been different
- Lord Henry Wotton, Picture of Dorian Gray

Gratiano: Let me play the fool:With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come
(Act I, Sc I, Merchant of Venice)

Why has my motley diary no jokes? Because it is a soliloquy and every man is grave alone. Ralph Waldo Emerson

As a writer of light fiction, I have always till now been handicappedby the fact that my disposition was cheerful, my heart intact, and my life unsoured. Handicapped, I say, because the public likes to feelthat a writer of farcical stories is piquantly miserable in his privatelife, and that, if he turns out anything amusing, he does it simply inorder to obtain relief from the almost insupportable weight of an existence which he has long since realized to be a wash-out.

- PG Wodehouse in the foreword to The Clicking of Cuthbert

We all need the eggs - Woody Allen, ending lines in Annie Hall