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Laughter

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Better is distress than laughter, for the sadness of the face makes the heart better. ~ Ecclesiastes
Without laughter life on our planet would be intolerable. ~ Steve Allen
Mirth is God's medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in it. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Laughter can be an audible expression of merriment and amusement or an inward feeling of joy or pleasure, in a reaction to certain stimuli, including fundamental stresses, which serves as an emotional balancing mechanism.

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
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A

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Man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter. ~ Joseph Addison
A dreadful laugh at last escapes his lips;
The laughter sets him free.
A Fool lives in the Universe! he cries.
The Fool is me! ~ Ray Bradbury
I embrace myself.
I laugh until I weep
And weep until I smile ~ Ray Bradbury
  • If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.
  • Without laughter life on our planet would be intolerable. So important is laughter to us that humanity highly rewards members of one of the most unusual professions on earth, those who make a living by inducing laughter in others. This is very strange if you stop to think of it: that otherwise sane and responsible citizens should devote their professional energies to causing others to make sharp, explosive barking-like exhalations.
  • All schizophrenia patients are mad, and none are sane. Their behaviour is incomprehensible. It tells us nothing about what they do in the rest of their lives, gives no insight into the human condition and has no lesson for sane people except how sane they are. There's nothing profound about it. Schizophrenics aren't clever or wise or witty — they may make some very odd remarks but that's because they're mad, and there's nothing to be got out of what they say. When they laugh at things the rest of us don't think are funny, like the death of a parent, they're not being penetrating, and on other occasions they're not wryly amused at at the simplicity and stupidity of the psychiatrist, however well justified that might be in many cases. They're laughing because they're mad, too mad to be able to tell what's funny any more. The rewards for being sane may not be very many but knowing what's funny is one of them. And that's an end of the matter.

B

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  • Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.
    • Karl Barth, as quoted in The Harper Book Of Quotations (1993) edited by Robert I. Fitzhenry, p. 223
  • You grow up the first day you have your first good laugh — at yourself.
    • Ethel Barrymore, as quoted in 1,600 Quotes & Pieces of Wisdom That Just Might Help You Out When You're Stuck in a Moment (and Can't Get Out of It!) (2003) by Gary P. Guthrie
  • Je me hâte de me moquer de tous, de peur d'être obligé d'en pleurer.
  • Mirth is God's medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in it.
  • LAUGHTER, n. An interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious and, though intermittent, incurable. Liability to attacks of laughter is one of the characteristics distinguishing man from the animals -- these being not only inaccessible to the provocation of his example, but impregnable to the microbes having original jurisdiction in bestowal of the disease. Whether laughter could be imparted to animals by inoculation from the human patient is a question that has not been answered by experimentation. Dr. Meir Witchell holds that the infection character of laughter is due to the instantaneous fermentation of sputa diffused in a spray. From this peculiarity he names the disorder Convulsio spargens.
  • When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
    And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
    When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
    And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.
  • That so much time was wasted in this pain.
    Ten thousand years ago he might have let off down
    To not return again!
    A dreadful laugh at last escapes his lips;
    The laughter sets him free.
    A Fool lives in the Universe! he cries.
    The Fool is me!
    And with one final shake of laughter
    Breaks his bonds.
    The nails fall skittering to marble floors.
    And Christ, knelt at the rail, sees miracle
    As Man steps down in amiable wisdom
    To give himself what no one else can give:
    His liberty.
    • Ray Bradbury, in "Christ, Old Student in a New School" (1972)
  • I am the dreamer and the doer
    I the hearer and the knower
    I the giver and the taker
    I the sword and the wound of sword.
    If this be true, then let sword fall free from hand.
    I embrace myself.
    I laugh until I weep
    And weep until I smile
    • Ray Bradbury, in "Christ, Old Student in a New School" (1972)
  • Tragedy is all about losing. And humor is all about gaining perspective. Humour returns our gladness. And with gladness comes generosity. Humor returns us to the light and makes us light—it kills grudges, buries bodies–buries revenge—buries blame and guilt—fear and dread. Laughter, like hiccups and sneezes and farts and burps, relieves us of severity.
  • Truth's sacred fort th' exploded laugh shall win,
    And coxcombs vanquish Berkeley with a grin.
    • John Brown, Essay on Satire, Part II. V. 224, On the death of Pope, prefixed to Pope's Essay on Man, in Warburton's edition of Pope's Works
  • The landlord's laugh was ready chorus.
  • And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
    'Tis that I may not weep.

C

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Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified. ~ G. K. Chesterton
  • No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
  • How much lies in Laughter: the cipher-key, wherewith we decipher the whole man.
  • Nam risu inepto res ineptior nulla est.
    • Nothing is more silly than silly laughter.
    • Catullus, Carmina, XXXIX, 16
I admire the man who exclaimed, “I have lost a day!” because he had neglected to do any good in the course of it; but another has observed that “the most lost of all days, is that in which we have not laughed;” and, I must confess, that I feel myself greatly of his opinion.
  • It is not funny that anything else should fall down, only that a man should fall down … Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
  • Loud laughter is the mirth of the mob, who are only pleased with silly things; for true wit or good sense never excited a laugh since the creation of the world.
  • I'm struck by how laughter connects you with people. It's almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you're just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy.
  • If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you more open to my ideas. And, if I can persuade you to laugh at a particular point that I make, by laughing at it you acknowledge it as true.
    • John Cleese, as quoted in What Winners Do to Win! : The 7 Minutes a Day That Can Change Your Life (2003) by Nicki Joy, p. 113
  • Not living in fear is a great gift, because certainly these days we do it so much. And do you know what I like about comedy? You can't laugh and be afraid at the same time — of anything. If you're laughing, I defy you to be afraid.

D

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  • He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

E

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Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods. ~ Albert Einstein
  • Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
    • Albert Einstein in his Essays Presented to Leo Baeck on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday (1954), p. 26
  • It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart. Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.
  • For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool: this also is vanity.
    • Ecclesiastes 7:6 KJV
  • Ce n'est pas être bien aisé que de rire.
    • He is not always at ease who laughs.
    • St. Evremond, as reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 428-30

F

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  • Maybe they [women who were executed by the Taliban] were guilty of the worst of all crimes: to laugh. Yes. Laughing. I said laughter. Didn't you know that with the Taliban in Afghanistan women can't laugh, that they are even forbidden to laugh?
  • It’s no use crying over spilt evils. It’s better to mop them up laughing.

G

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  • I have known sorrow—therefore I
    May laugh with you, O friend, more merrily
    Than those who never sorrowed upon earth
    And know not laughter's worth.

    I have known laughter—therefore I
    May sorrow with you far more tenderly
    Than those who never guess how sad a thing
    Seems merriment to one heart's suffering.
  • In a dream I saw Jesus and My God Pan sitting together in the heart of the forest.
    They laughed at each other's speech, with the brook that ran near them, and the laughter of Jesus was the merrier. And they conversed long.
    • Khalil Gibran, in Jesus, The Son of Man (1928), "Sarkis an old Greek Shepherd, called the madman: Jesus and Pan"
  • I am the laughter of the new-born child
    On whose soft-breathing sleep an angel smiled.
  • Your laugh is of the sardonic kind.
    • Caius Gracchus, when his adversaries laughed at his defeat, as reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 428-30

H

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  • Poets have imagined no utterance of fiends or hobgoblins so fearfully appropriate as a laugh. And even the obtuse lime-burner felt his nerves shaken, as this strange man looked inward at his own heart, and burst into laughter that rolled away into the night, and was indistinctly reverberated among the hills.
  • Low gurgling laughter, as sweet
    As the swallow's song i' the South,
    And a ripple of dimples that, dancing, meet
    By the curves of a perfect mouth.
  • Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.
  • Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.
    • William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers, "Lecture I: On Wit and Humour" (1819)
  • Laugh not too much; the witty man laughs least:
    For wit is news only to ignorance.
    Lesse at thine own things laugh; lest in the jest
    Thy person share, and the conceit advance.
  • And unextinguish'd laughter shakes the skies.
    • Homer, The Iliad, Book I, line 771. Odyssey, Book VIII, line 116. Pope's translation
  • Discit enim citius, meminitque libentius ilud
    Quod quis deridet, quam quod probat et veneratur.
  • For a man learns more quickly and remembers more easily that which he laughs at, than that which he approves and reveres.
    • Horace, Epistles, Book II. 1. 262

I

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J

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  • Laugh, and be fat, sir, your penance is known.
    They that love mirth, let them heartily drink,
    'Tis the only receipt to make sorrow sink.

K

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  • All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.
  • I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.

L

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  • We must laugh before we are happy, for fear we die before we laugh at all.
  • Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously.
  • Scholars of the highest class, when they hear about the Tao, take it and practice it earnestly.
    Scholars of the middle class, when they hear of it, take it half earnestly.
    Scholars of the lowest class, when they hear of it, laugh at it.
    Without the laughter, there would be no Tao.

M

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  • Laughter is poison to fear.
  • Those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either.
  • There are three things which are real: God, human folly, and laughter. Since the first two pass our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third.
    • Aubrey Menen, Rama Retold (1954), p. 231. This is a modern retelling of part of the Ramayana. President John F. Kennedy presented his friend, White House appointment secretary David Powers, with a silver beer mug for his birthday, April 26, 1963. The inscription on the mug was a slight variation on the lines above:
      There are three things which are real:
God, human folly and laughter.
The first two are beyond our comprehension
So we must do what we can with the third.
  • Creator. A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
    • H.L. Mencken, in A Book of Burlesques‎ (1920), p. 203. and A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949), Ch. 30; a paraphrase of this has become misattributed to Voltaire:
God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
  • The sense of humor has other things to do than to make itself conspicuous in the act of laughter.
    • Alice Meynell, "Laughter", in Ceres' Runaway and Other Essays (London: Burns & Oates, 1909), p. 33
  • Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee
    Jest, and youthful Jollity,
    Quips, and Cranks, and wanton Wiles,
    Nods, and Becks, and wreathed Smiles,
    Such as hang on Hebe's cheek,
    And love to live in dimple sleek;
    Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
    And Laughter holding both his sides.

N

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  • Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

P

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  • Seventy-three men sailed in, from the San Francisco Bay,
    Rolled off of their ship and here's what they had to say.
    "We're calling everyone to ride along, to another shore.
    Where we can laugh our lives away and be free once more."
    But no one heard them calling, no one came at all,
    'Cause they were too busy watching those old raindrops fall.
  • To laugh, if but for an instant only, has never been granted to man before the fortieth day from his birth, and then it is looked upon as a miracle of precocity.
    • Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book VII, Chapter I. Holland's translation
  • Laugh at your friends, and if your friends are sore;
    So much the better, you may laugh the more.
  • The man that loves and laughs must sure do well.
  • To laugh were want of goodness and of grace;
    And to be grave, exceeds all pow'r of face.

Q

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  • Nimium risus pretium est, si probitatis impendio constat.
    • A laugh costs too much when bought at the expense of virtue.
    • Quintilian, De Institutione Oratoria, VI. 3. 5

R

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  • One inch of joy surmounts of grief a span,
    Because to laugh is proper to the man.
  • Put your prejudice aside,
    For, really, there's nothing here that's outrageous,
    Nothing sick, or bad — or contagious.
    Not that I sit here glowing with pride
    For my book: all you'll find is laughter:
    That's all the glory my heart is after,
    Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you.
    I'd rather write about laughing than crying,
    For laughter makes men human, and courageous.
BE HAPPY!
  • Tel qui rit vendredi, dimanche pleurera.
    • He who laughs on Friday will weep on Sunday.
    • Jean Racine, Plaideurs, I. 1
  • Has he gone to the land of no laughter,
    The man who made mirth for us all?
  • Niemand wird tiefer traurig als wer zu viel lächelt.
    • No one will be more profoundly sad than he who laughs too much.
    • Jean Paul Richter, Hesperus, XIX
  • Now everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody Else, but when it happens to you, why it seems to lose some of its Humor, and if it keeps on happening, why the entire laughter kinder Fades out of it.
    • Will Rogers, in "Warning to Jokers: Lay off the Prince", in The Illiterate Digest (1924), p. 131

S

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Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough... ~ William Saroyan
Social laughter is momentary, soon burns itself out and passes away like the fire and smokes of straw, but genius shakes the very skies with its lasting, inextinguishable laughter. ~ Boris Sidis
  • Castigat ridendo mores.
    • He chastizes manners with a laugh.
    • Santeuil, motto of the Comédie Italienne, and Opéra Comique, Paris
  • Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
    • William Saroyan, in The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934), Preface
  • I have always been a laugher, disturbing people who are not laughers, upsetting whole audiences at theatres... I laugh, that's all. I love to laugh. Laugher to me is being alive. I have had rotten times, and I have laughed through them. Even in the midst of the very worst times I have laughed.
  • The brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, is not able to invent anything that tends to laughter, more than I invent or is invented on me.
  • Society and its ideal average, normal mediocrity with its pleasing, mannerly, commonplace platitudes may have its fling of jeering at genius for not conforming to social usage and for breaking away from the well-trodden paths of social ruts. Far more effective and deadly are the stones of ridicule cast by the hand of genius at the Philistine Goliath, strong in his brute social power, but dull of wits. Social laughter is momentary, soon burns itself out and passes away like the fire and smokes of straw, but genius shakes the very skies with its lasting, inextinguishable laughter.
  • Laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature: delight hath a joy in it either permanent or present; laughter hath only a scornful tickling.

T

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Never laugh at live dragons. ~ J. R. R. Tolkien, in The Hobbit
  • Stupid people, who do not know how to laugh, are always pompous and self-conceited; that is, ungentle, uncharitable, unchristian.
    • William Makepeace Thackeray, in Sketches and Travels in Londonm : Mr. Brown's Letters to His Nephew (1856), "On Love, Marriage, Men and Women"
  • For still the World prevail'd, and its dread laugh,
    Which scarce the firm Philosopher can scorn.
  • Fight Virtue's cause, stand up in Wit's defence,
    Win us from vice and laugh us into sense.
  • Your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug,—push it a little—crowd it a little—weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.
    • Mark Twain, "The Chronicle of Young Satan" (ca. 1897–1900, unfinished), published posthumously in Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (1969), ed. William Merriam Gibson

U

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V

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  • He laughs best who laughs last.
    • John Vanbrugh, The Country House, Act II, sc. v (1706); comparable to an older formulation of the proverbial notion:
    • Variants : Laugh on laugh on my freind Hee laugheth best that laugheth to the end.
      • Anonymous Jacobean student play, in 'The Christmas Prince : An account of the St. John's College Revels held at Oxford in 1607-8, from the original manuscript in the college library (1923), edited by Frederic S. Boas , p. 109
    • Better the last smile than the first laughter.
    • Ray—Collection of Old English Proverbs , as reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 428-30

W

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The man with the real sense of humor is the man who can put himself in the spectator's place and laugh at his own misfortunes. That is what I am called upon to do every day. ~ Bert Williams
  • Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
    Weep, and you weep alone;
    For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
    But has trouble enough of its own.
  • I think that wherever your journey takes you, there are new gods waiting there, with divine patience — and laughter.
    • Susan M. Watkins quoted in: Shawn Brennan, ‎Julie Winklepleck, ‎Gina Renée Misiroglu (1994) Resourceful Woman, p. 532
  • The man with the real sense of humor is the man who can put himself in the spectator's place and laugh at his own misfortunes. That is what I am called upon to do every day.
    • Bert Williams, minstrel show comedian, in "The Comic Side of Trouble" in The American Magazine (January 1918), p. 33
  • Care to our coffin adds a nail, no doubt;
    And every Grin, so merry, draws one out.

Y

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  • The house of laughter makes a house of woe.
    • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night VIII, line 757

Z

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