Quotes About Laughter

Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by laughing at them destroy them? For 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. - "The Chronicle of Young Satan," Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts

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.

When you really laugh, for those few moments you are in a deep meditative state. Thinking stops. It is impossible to laugh and think together...If you are still thinking. laughter will be just so-so...It will be a crippled laughter.

There is nothing more distressing ... than the hard, scoffing spirit which treats the allegation of dishonesty in a public man as a cause for laughter. Such laughter is worse than the crackling of thorns under a pot, for it denotes not merely the vacant mind, but the heart in which high emotions have been choked before they could grow to fruition.

Laughter, on the other hand, " Petrarch went on, "is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. That's why I tell you yet again, and you want to keep in mind: Boccaccio doesn't understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter.

Laughter is the evidence that we're still here, the proof that our tragedies will not define us forever. Laughter is the language of the survivor.

Beyond the deepest tragedy there is laughter; even in the midst of tragedy there is always the possibility for laughter.

The purpose of laughter is to bring one to silence, and the purpose of silence is to bring one to laughter.

If the earth is fit for laughter then surely heaven is filled with it. Heaven is the birthplace of laughter.

Laughter relieves us of superfluous energy, which, if it remained unused, might become negative, that is, poison. Laughter is the antidote.

Ada girl, adored girl, [...] I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended.

Laughter was like a fresh breeze - it cleaned its way through the body making everything feel good. Did other species have such a simple healer?

To put it another way, pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Why must it be pain? Why can't he rouse us more gently, with violins or laughter? Because the dream from which we must be wakened, is the dream that all is well.

The weeping of an heir is laughter in disguise.

From the small clubs of the Harlem Renaissance where he began playing saxophone to world tours for the biggest of the big bands, Benny Carter redefined American jazz. From the start, his fellow musicians said the way he played the sax was amazing. They say that about me, too. (Laughter.) But I don't think they mean it in quite the same way.

And let that day be lost to us on which we did not dance once! And let that wisdom be false to us that brought no laughter with it!

Laughter survives... it has to survive.

In 1847 I gave an address at Newton, Mass., before a Teachers' Institute conducted by Horace Mann. My subject was grasshoppers. I passed around a large jar of these insects, and made every teacher take one and hold it while I was speaking. If any one dropped the insect, I stopped till he picked it up. This was at that time a great innovation, and excited much laughter and derision. There can be no true progress in the teaching of natural science until such methods become general.

I learned very early that an audience would relax and look at things differently if they felt they could laugh with you from time to time. There's an energy that comes through the release of tension that is laughter.

I couldn't get the laughter out of my head. It wasn't career. It wasn't even a choice. It was a calling.

Writer-director John Roecker's debut, Live Freaky! Die Freaky! will have you convulsing on the floor ... with nausea, laughter, or both.

Holding on to anger, resentment and hurt only gives you tense muscles, a headache and a sore jaw from clenching your teeth. Forgiveness gives you back the laughter and the lightness in your life.

AQAL is a map of samsara, a map of the prison, but if you gonna make a prison brake,you need a good map. (laughter)

The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms -hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.

Laughter. It connects me to the moment, the people around me, nothing like a good belly laugh to feel alive. And having sex outdoors, of course...

I hesitate to say I was the class clown, but that was kind of how I interacted with other kids in school, and I very much appreciated the responses I got. The validation of laughter is often a very heavy psychological balm.

I was in a play in elementary school and had to jump up and run away. I was nervous and tripped and fell down and everyone laughed. Their laughter made me relax, so I pretended it was part of the show.

They held hands and knew that only the coffin would lie in the earth; the bubbly laughter and the press of fingers in the palm would stay aboveground forever. At first, as they stood there, their hands were clenched together. They relaxed slowly until during the walk back home their fingers were laced in as gentle a clasp as that of any two young girlfriends trotting up the road on a summer day wondering what happened to butterflies in the winter.

If love is the treasure, laughter is the key.

This crown to crown the laughing man, this rose-wreath crown: I myself have set this crown upon my head, I myself have pronounced my laughter holy.

Laughter always forgives.

Stories? We all spend our lives telling them, about this, about that, about people … But some? Some stories are so good we wish they’d never end. They’re so gripping that we’ll go without sleep just to see a little bit more. Some stories bring us laughter and sometimes they bring us tears … but isn’t that what a great story does? Makes you feel? Stories that are so powerful … they really are with us forever.

Laughter is just like champagne -- only without the headache afterwards.

Clear communication. Respect. A lot of laughter. And a lot of orgasms. That's what makes a marriage work.

It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different. Now I understand that I've gotten to enjoy things that others have not, whether it's the laughter, the poetry of my Spanish language - I love Spanish poetry, because my grandmother loved it - our food, our music. Everything about my culture has given me enormous education and joy.

Horse-play, romping, frequent and loud fits of laughter, jokes, and indiscriminate familiarity, will sink both merit and knowledge into a degree of contempt. They compose at most a merry fellow; and a merry fellow was never yet a respectable man.

Meanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter at the absurdity of man, who kills so easily and so violently, and once a year sends out cards praying for "Peace on Earth."

Laughter keeps you healthy. You can survive by seeing the humor in everything. Thumb your nose at sadness; turn the tables on tragedy. You can’t laugh and be angry, you can’t laugh and feel sad, you can’t laugh and feel envious.

When I was in kindergarten, I had one line in a little play. I said, I am Patrick Potato and this is my cousin, Mrs. Tomato, and I heard laughter. I wanted to be an actress from that moment on.

The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.

Why are we such tortured human beings, with tears in our eyes and false laughter on our lips? If you could walk alone among those hills or in the woods or along the long, white, bleached sands, in that solitude you would know what meditation is. The ecstasy of solitude comes when you are not frightened to be alone no longer belonging to the world or attached to anything. Then, like that dawn that came up this morning, it comes silently, and makes a golden path in the very stillness, which was at the beginning, which is now, and which will be always there.

The dark dangerous forest is still there, my friends. Beyond the space of the astronauts and the astronomers, beyond the dark, tangled regions of Freudian and Jungian psychiatry, beyond the dubious psi-realms of Dr. Rhine, beyond the areas policed by the commissars and priests and motivations-research men, far, far beyond the mad, beat, half-hysterical laughter... the utterly unknown still is and the eerie and ghostly lurk, as much wrapped in mystery as ever.

Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter -- to all these music gives voice

In a world of regret, sacrifice and hardship, laughter and music are medicine.

Of everything I have seen, it's you I want to go on seeing: of everything I've touched, it's your flesh I want to go on touching. I love your orange laughter. I am moved by the sight of you sleeping. What am I to do, love, loved one? I don't know how others love or how people loved in the past. I live, watching you, loving you. Being in love is my nature.

Laughter isn't even the other side of tears. It is tears turned inside out. Truly the suffering is great, here on earth. We blunder along, shredded by our mistakes, bludgeoned by our faults. Not having a clue where the dark path leads us. But on the whole, we stumble along bravely, don't you think?

The jackdaw, stript of her stolen colours, provokes our laughter.

The laughter of the aphorism is sometimes triumphant, but seldom carefree.