Happiness Quote by Joseph Roux

Roux draws a sly moral X-ray: emotion as performance. The line splits human display into two social currencies - beauty and virtue - and then asks you to notice how often our most “spontaneous” signals are curated for an audience. Laughing becomes less a reflex than a showcase for “fine teeth,” a metonym for youth, status, health, desirability. Crying, meanwhile, can be just as strategic: a bid to certify “good hearts,” to launder one’s motives through visible softness. The sting is that both gestures, usually treated as proof of authenticity, can be accessories.

As a clergyman, Roux isn’t merely scolding vanity; he’s diagnosing a temptation familiar to religious life: the hunger to appear righteous. His pairing is pointed because it weaponizes opposites. Laughter (light, bright, public) and tears (heavy, intimate, morally charged) are both susceptible to ego. That’s the subtext: even the emotions we excuse as beyond calculation are vulnerable to self-advertisement.

The quote works because it refuses the comforting binary of “happy people are shallow, sad people are deep.” Instead, it suggests the deeper divide is between feeling and signaling. “Show” is the key verb - not have teeth, not have a heart, but display them. Roux is warning about a society of proofs, where the face becomes a résumé and sincerity gets reduced to legible cues. It’s less about banning laughter or tears than about mistrusting the easy inference: visible emotion equals inner truth.