"There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor."
— Charles Dickens
There Is Nothing In The World
There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.
About this quote
An aside by the narrator in Stave Three of A Christmas Carol (1843), as Scrooge invisibly watches his nephew Fred's Christmas party. Fred's infectious laughter spreads to every guest in the room, prompting Dickens's narrator to observe that laughter travels like a benevolent contagion — an ironic inversion of the disease metaphors the novella otherwise reserves for Scrooge's miserliness. The passage foreshadows Scrooge's own liberation into laughter in Stave Five.
Source
A Christmas Carol, 1843