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"Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they find laughable."
-Anon.
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Mirth is God's medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in it. Grim care, moroseness, anxiety--all this rust of life--ought to be scoured off by the oil of mirth.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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"Nobody ever died of laughter."
-Max Beerbohm
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"Laughter is the shortest distance between two people."
-Victor Borge
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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.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
-Thomas Carlyle
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"The most wasted day of all is that during which we have not laughed."
-Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort
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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. A man of parts and fashion is therefore often seen to smile, but never heard to laugh.
-Lord Chesterfield, [letter to his son]
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There comes a time when suddenly you realize that laughter is something you remember and that you were the one laughing.
-Marlene Dietrich, “Laughter,” Marlene Dietrich’s ABC, 1962
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Life can be wildly tragic at times, and I've had my share.
But whatever happens to you, you still have to keep a slightly comic attitude. In the final analyses, you have got not to forget to laugh.
-Katharine Hepburn
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"Laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly."
-Thomas Hobbes
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"If you don't learn to laugh at troubles, you won't have anything to laugh at when you grow old."
-Edward W. Howe
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Laughter and weeping, the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum; both provide channels for the overflow of emotion; both are “luxury reflexes” without apparent utility. This much they have in common; in every other respect they are direct opposites.
-Arthur Koestler, “Art and Emotion", Bricks to Babel: Selected Writings with Comments by the Author, Hutchison (1980)
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Those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart, don't know how to laugh either.
-Golda Meir
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"Perhaps I know why it is man alone who laughs: He alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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There is a form that springs from the heart, heard every day in the merry voice of childhood, the expression of a laughter-loving spirit that defies analysis by the philosopher, which has nothing rigid or mechanical in it, and is totally without social significance. Bubbling spontaneously from the artless heart of child or man, without egoism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.
-William Osler
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"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."
-George Bernard Shaw
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The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms—hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.
-James Thurber, "New York Times Magazine", December 7, 1958
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"[Humanity] has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push 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 Mysterious Stranger, ch. 10, 1916
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Laughter shall drown the raucous shout;
And, though these shelt’ring walls are thin,
May they be strong to keep hate out
And hold love in.
-Louis Untermeyer, Prayer for This House (l. 13–16). Poems That Live Forever. Hazel Felleman, ed. (1965) Doubleday & Company
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Laughter would be bereaved if snobbery died.
-Peter Ustinov
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I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me to be the most civilized music in the world.
-Peter Ustinov
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Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Books about Laughter
