Quotations: Laughter

When people are laughing, they're generally not killing each other.
Alan Alda

I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.
Woody Allen

So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter.
Gordon W. Allport

Even if there is nothing to laugh about, laugh on credit.
Anon

Laughter is an orgasm triggered by the intercourse of sense and nonsense.
Anon

Mirth is God's medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in it.
Henry Ward Beecher

Nobody ever died of laughter.
Max Beerbohm

Laughter is an instant vacation.
Milton Berle

Laughter is the sensation of feeling good all over and showing it principally in one place.
Josh Billings

Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
Victor Borge

A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.
Thomas Carlyle

Laughter means sympathy.
Thomas Carlyle

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
Thomas Carlyle

How much lies in Laughter: the cipher-key, wherewith we decipher the whole man.
Thomas Carlyle

Nothing is more silly than silly laughter.
Catullus

The most completely lost of all days is that on which one has not laughed.
Sebastien-Roch-Nicolas de Chamfort

A day without laughter is a day wasted.
Charlie Chaplin

I am tipsy with laughing.
William Congreve

Laughter is inner jogging.
Norman Cousins

Laughter is a powerful way to tap positive emotions.
Norman Cousins

Ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.
Norman Cousins

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
E E cummings

If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.
Clarence Darrow

Laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects.
Arnold Glasow

Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.
Jack Handey

We do have a zeal for laughter in most situations, give or take a dentist.
Joseph Heller

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

At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.
Jean Houston

You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.
Stephen King

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.
Joan Lunden

From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.
Groucho Marx

Laughter gives us distance. It allows us to step back from an event, deal with it and then move on.
Bob Newhart

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

A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor's book.
Irish Proverb

What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul.
Yiddish Proverb

May your walls know joy; May every room hold laughter and every window open to great possibility.
Maryanne Radmacher-Hershey

What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh!
Agnes Repplier

Sometimes the laughter in mothering is the recognition of the ironies and absurdities. Sometime, though, it's just pure, unthinking delight.
Barbara Schapiro

Carry laughter with you wherever you go.
Hugh Sidey

I am sure that since I had the use of my reason, no human being has ever heard me laugh.
Philip Dormer Stanhope

The vulgar only laugh, but never smile; whereas well-bred people often smile, but seldom laugh.
Philip Dormer Stanhope

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.
Philip Dormer Stanhope

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
Mark Twain

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

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

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.
Kurt Vonnegut

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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