Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

Not in Wilde’s works: the sources were searched for ‘wherever they go’ and ‘whenever they go’. Quote Investigator (2019) found it first as an anonymous filler in Success Magazine of May 1908, titled ‘Others Whenever’: ‘Some people make happiness wherever they go.’ Newspapers reprinted it that month, and the Insurance Press turned it into a joke about insurance agents. The columnist Olin Miller used it in 1934. In Frederick B. Wilcox’s A Little Book of Aphorisms (1947) it appears as ‘Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go’, marked ‘Anon.’, directly after a genuine Wilde line (‘In this world there are only two tragedies…’, from Lady Windermere’s Fan); QI suggests the attribution came from a misreading of that page. The first explicit credit to Wilde QI found is in Herbert V. Prochnow’s Speaker’s Handbook of Epigrams and Witticisms (1955). Wikiquote lists it as disputed.

A popular joke credited to Wilde in quote collections and on greeting cards. It is in none of his works and first appears, without a name, in an American magazine in 1908, eight years after his death.

Some people make others happy by arriving, others by leaving.

Not Wilde’s: an anonymous magazine joke of 1908. Credit it as anonymous.

• The form on posters and social mediaSome people bring happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go. Common modern wording, with or without Wilde’s name.

Happiness, Emotions

• Golf is a good walk spoiled. (not found) Mark Twain
• No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one. (misattributed) Elbert Hubbard
• A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back again when it begins to rain. (not found) Robert Frost
• Two intelligent people cannot fall in love; true love needs one idiot. (not found) Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book. (not found) Marcus Tullius Cicero

• quoteinvestigator.com/2019/08/09/go
• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde (Disputed: ‘a version was published anonymously in an insurance magazine in 1908 … the earliest attribution to Wilde is from 1955’)

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.” Attributed to Oscar Wilde. No. It is not in Wilde’s works, and who first wrote it is not known. Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/some-cause-happiness-wherever-they-go/ (checked 20 October 2026).

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