Hospitality: making your guests feel like they're at home, even if you wish they were.

This is a modern, anonymous witticism that circulates widely in quotation collections, greeting cards, and online humor lists about manners and entertaining. It plays on the conventional ideal of hospitality—making guests comfortable and welcome—by admitting the private, sometimes contradictory feelings a host may have when entertaining out of obligation, social pressure, or simple fatigue. The joke depends on the tension between public etiquette (warmth, generosity, tact) and the host’s inner monologue (impatience, desire for privacy). Because it is commonly transmitted without attribution and appears in many compilations, it is best treated as a piece of folk humor rather than a traceable literary aphorism.

The line satirizes the performance aspect of politeness: good hospitality is defined not by what the host feels, but by what the guest experiences. By adding “even if you wish they were,” it acknowledges that hosting can be emotionally ambivalent—one can behave kindly while privately wanting the visit to end. The humor softens a potentially rude truth, suggesting that civility often involves self-restraint and acting against one’s immediate preferences. As an aphorism, it also hints at a broader social insight: many social virtues (hospitality, patience, generosity) are measured in actions rather than sentiments, and the gap between the two is a common, human condition.