Happiness Quote by Anthony Burgess

Burgess takes a syrupy Victorian maxim and spikes it with a slapstick truth serum. The original line ("Laugh and the world laughs with you; weep and you weep alone") flatters the reader into feeling tragically misunderstood. Burgess swaps tears for snoring and suddenly the romance collapses. Nobody is persecuting you for your sorrow; they just can’t stand the noise. It’s a joke, but it’s also a diagnosis of how social life actually works: companionship often hinges less on shared depths than on tolerable surfaces.

The specific intent is deflation. Burgess, a novelist suspicious of sentimentality, yanks the moral lesson out of greeting-card territory and returns it to the body: breathing, sleep, irritation, the petty physics of intimacy. Snoring is involuntary, unglamorous, and communal in the worst way. Laughter invites participation; snoring demands endurance. That’s why the line lands: it’s not about cruelty to the sad, it’s about the conditional nature of solidarity.

Subtextually, it’s a miniature portrait of modern sociability. We like emotions that confirm our own vitality (laughter) and recoil from anything that inconveniences us (your sleep, your needs, your unedited humanity). Even in bed, the most literal space of togetherness, you can be exiled by a small, repetitive sound.

Context matters because Burgess wrote in an era of loosening proprieties and rising skepticism about pious aphorisms. He’s not offering comfort; he’s offering calibration. The world isn’t always heartless, just impatient - and the line’s wit is how he gets that bitter pill to go down.