Happiness Quote by Edward Young

A neat couplet that lands like a moral booby trap: the place built for laughter ends up manufacturing grief. Young, an Anglican poet best known for Night Thoughts, is writing from a culture that treated mirth with suspicion and saw pleasure as a slippery gateway to spiritual rot. In the early 18th century, “laughter” isn’t innocent; it’s the sound of a room deciding not to take death, duty, or God seriously. The “house” is doing double duty: a literal social space (the tavern, the salon, the playhouse) and a metaphor for the inner life you construct by habit. Make it a house of laughs and you are, brick by brick, building a future collapse.

What makes the line work is its severe architecture. The repetition of “house” and the tight, almost proverb-like cadence mimic the inevitability it warns about. It’s a trapdoor syllogism: if you organize your life around amusement, you’re not just escaping sorrow; you’re incubating it. The subtext is less “don’t have fun” than “don’t outsource meaning to entertainment.” Laughter here reads as denial dressed up as sociability, the kind of noise that keeps the dark at bay until the bill comes due.

Young’s intent is corrective, but also psychological: pleasures don’t merely distract from woe, they can prime it - through emptiness, dependency, and the hard recoil when the party ends. The sentence is basically an 18th-century critique of coping-by-distraction, delivered with the icy confidence of a maxim.