Laughter quotes
2.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside laughter — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Let us not use bombs and guns to overcome the world. Let us use love and compassion. Peace begins with a smile-smile five times a day at someone you don't really want to smile at at all-do it for peace. So let us radiate peace...and extinguish in the world and in the hearts of all men all hatred and love for power."
"Let us have wine and woman, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda water the day after. Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; The best of life is but intoxication: Glory, the grape, love, gold, in these are sunk The hopes of all men, and of every nation; Without their sap, how branchless were the trunk Of life's strange tree, so fruitful on occasion: But to return--Get very drunk; and when You wake with head-ache, you shall see what then."
"A good, real, unrestrained, hearty laugh is a sort of glorified internal massage, performed rapidly and automatically. It manipulates and revitalizes corners and unexplored crannies of the system that are unresponsive to most other exercise methods. With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die."
"Real life is in love, laughter, and work."
"Babies should enjoy the freedom to vocalize whether it be in church, a public meeting place, during a movie, or after hours when the lights are out. They have not yet learned that joy and laughter have to last a lifetime and must be conserved."
"Laugh now, cry later."
"Comedy holds the greatest risk for an actor, and laughter is the reward."
"You and I are created for transcendence, laughter, caring. God deliberately did not make the world perfect, for God is looking for you and me to be fellow workers with God."
"But playing your music as loud as you want and coming home drunk aren't real life. Real life, it turns out, is diapers and lawnmowers, decks that need painting, a wife that needs to be listened to, kids that need to be taught right from wrong, a checkbook, an oil change, a sunset behind a mountain, laughter at a kitchen table, too much wine, a chipped tooth, and a screaming child."
"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"
"I talked to one accountant, a very nice fellow who I would have been glad to have his family marry into mine. He said, "What these other accounting firms have done is very unethical. The [tax avoidance scheme] works best if it's not found out [by the IRS], so we only give it to our best clients, not the rest, so it's unlikely to be discovered. So my firm is better than the others." [Laughter] I'm not kidding. And he was a perfectly nice man. People just follow the crowd...Their mind just drifts off in a ghastly way."
"Laughter is the most inexpensive and most effective wonder drug. Laughter is a universal medicine."
"To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future."
"The laughter that happens when people are truth-telling and showing up and being real - I call that "knowing laughter." That's what happens between people when we recognize the absurdity of the belief that we're alone in anything."
"Happiness, laughter and joy abound, when friends, family, and lovers are around."
"Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down."
"You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance."
"Laughter is America's most important export."
"Yet they that know all things but know That all this life can give us is A child's laughter, a woman's kiss."
"How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure."
