The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in psychology, philosophy, sociology, literature, theology, and related fields.
Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History is by Professor Timothy Hampton, who teaches French and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, the United States of America.
Cheerfulness is defined as an outgoing, optimistic form of happiness.
The TU Library collection also includes other books about different aspects of cheerfulness.
Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History traces this theme in literary, philosophical, and art history from early modern to contemporary times. Among authors analyzed are Shakespeare, Montaigne, Hume, Austen and Emerson, Dickens, and Nietzsche. Professor Hampton also examines the philosophical construal of cheerfulness — as a theme in Protestant theology, a focus of medical writing, a topic in Enlightenment psychology, and a category of modern esthetics.
Professor Hampton suggests that the more difficult times are, the more it helps to be cheerful if possible.
Here are some thoughts about cheerfulness by number of authors, some of whom are represented in the TU Library collection:
Between levity and cheerfulness there is a wide distinction; and the mind which is most open to levity is frequently a stranger to cheerfulness.
- Hugh Blair, reported in The Saturday Magazine (September 28, 1833)
A cheerful temper joined with innocence will make beauty attractive, knowledge delightful and wit good-natured. It will lighten sickness, poverty and affliction, convert ignorance into an amiable simplicity, and render deformity itself agreeable.
- Joseph Addison, The Tatler, No. 192.
Cheered up himself with ends of verse
And sayings of philosophers.
- Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part I (1663-64)
Cheerful at morn he wakes from short repose,
Breathes the keen air, and carols as he goes.
- Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller (1764)
A cheerful look makes a dish a feast.
- George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum (1651)
Cheer up, the worst is yet to come.
- Philander Johnson, Everybody’s Magazine (May, 1920)
Look cheerfully upon me.
Here, love; thou seest how dilgent I am.
- William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593-94), Act IV, scene 3
A cheerful life is what the Muses love,
A soaring spirit is their prime delight.
- William Wordsworth, From the Dark Chambers.
Corn shall make the young men cheerful.
- Zachariah, IX. 17.
Cheerful looks make every dish a feast.
- Philip Massinger
The most manifest sign of wisdom is continued cheerfulness.
- Michel de Montaigne
“Cheerfulness, it would appear,
is a matter which depends fully as much on the state
of things within,
as on the state of things without and around us.”
- Charlotte Brontë
These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing,
I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant,
Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting
To the purpose of One Above who is experimenting
With various mixtures of human character which goes best,
All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us.
There I go again. Smile, smile, and get some work to do
Then you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.
- Stevie Smith, Collected Poems
What time can be more beautiful than the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life?
- Leo Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
It was the serene cheerfulness of a man who has no nightmares, who feels at peace with himself and everyone else. They [Americans] were almost all of them like that. And it definitely got Maigret’s back up. It made him think of clothing that was too neat, too clean, too well-pressed.
- Georges Simenon, Maigret at the Coroner’s
Be cheerful—the problems that worry us most are those that never arrive.
- Benjamin Franklin
Jo gave her sister an encouraging pat on the shoulder as they parted for the day, each going a different way, each hugging her little warm turnover, and each trying to be cheerful in spite of wintry weather, hard work, and the unsatisfied desires of pleasure-loving youth.
- Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
As the power and goodness of Heaven are infinite in their extent, and infinite in their minuteness, to the mind cultivated as nature meant it to be, there is not only delight in contemplating the sublimity of the endless sea, or everlasting mountains, or the beauty of wide-extended landscapes; but there is a pleasure in looking at every flower, and every little shell that God has made. Nature has scattered around us, on every side, and for every sense, an in exhaustible profusion of beauty and sweetness, if we will but perceive it. The pleasures we derive from flowers, from forms, from musical sounds, are surely not given us in vain; and if we are constantly alive to these, we can never be in want of subjects of agreeable contemplation, and must be habitually cheerful. All that is required, in order that we should duly estimate these things, is that we should not have blunted or exhausted our minds by excessive indulgence of gross appetites and passions. In that fatal case, all those delicious fruits turn to ashes. Indeed, the man who looks at the gifts of nature without pleasure, or who hopes to enjoy the delights and blessings of life without feeling that gratitude to God forms their highest charms, and without becoming in consequence habitually cheerful, is surely much to be pitied.”
- Captain Basil Hall
Cheerfulness means a contented spirit, a pure heart, a kind and loving disposition; it means humility and ~ charity, a generous appreciation of others, and a modest opinion of self.
- William Makepeace Thackeray
To stay cheerful when involved in a gloomy and exceedingly responsible business is no inconsiderable art: yet what could be more necessary than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part. Only excess of strength is proof of strength. – A revaluation of all values, this question mark so black, so huge it casts a shadow over him who sets it up – such a destiny of a task compels one every instant to run out into the sunshine so as to shake off a seriousness grown all too oppressive.
- Frederich Nietzsche
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)