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Home  »  Respectfully Quoted  »  Mrs. Patrick (Beatrice Stella Tanner Campbell) Campbell (1865–1940)

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.

 
NUMBER: 1707
AUTHOR: Mrs. Patrick (Beatrice Stella Tanner Campbell) Campbell (1865–1940)
QUOTATION: “Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.”
ATTRIBUTION: MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL, letter to George Bernard Shaw, August 13, 1912.—Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell: Their Correspondence, ed. Alan Dent, p. 32 (1952).

Since this was in quotation marks in the letter, it may have been her own version of the familiar lines, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; / Weep, and you weep alone.” These are the first two lines of Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s poem, “Solitude,” first published in 1883 in her Poems of Passion and widely reprinted in newspapers, often without attribution.—Burton Stevenson, Famous Single Poems, pp. 223–242 (1935).
SUBJECTS: Sleep