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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"Freud wrote a book on the essence of humor, but he didn't know what he was talking about. Max Eastman wrote a book, The Enjoyment of Laughter, that was a much better book, but nobody bothered to read it."
"Do you think it's funny to be so serious when I'm not even out of high school?' she asked. 'I don't see how it could be any other way,' said Lee. 'Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn't in time."
"Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places."
"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."
"One of my teachers says the sound you hear in the center of the universe is laughter. I don't know if it's true, but if you do something and 30 years later it still produces laughter, that's a fantasy you can't make up."
"I’m not up for laughing, but their laughter makes the room feel safer, so we begin to explore."
"Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock-exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared."
"All dramatic realism is somewhat sadistic; an audience is persuaded to watch something that makes it uncomfortable and from which no relief is offered - no laughter, no tears, no purgation."
"Sometimes all you need in love is to make each other happy, to make each other laugh. So long as you can still do that ten years down the line then I think you're gold. Never let the laughter slip from your relationship."
"The jokes I used to do on 'Sex and the City' were always comic character things, and they were rarely hard jokes. As soon as you go up in front of people, it demands laughter."
"Our own peculiar human condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh."
"I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative."
"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."
"She is laughing up her sleeve at you."
"She laughed like she'd just invented laughter."
"And the small ripple spilt upon the beach Scarcely o'erpass'd the cream of your champagne, When o'er the brim the sparkling bumpers reach, That spring-dew of the spirit! the heart's rain! Few things surpass old wine; and they may preach Who please,—the more because they preach in vain,— Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda-water the day after."
"Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward - and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner."
"People hate it when they're tickled because laughter is not pleasant, if it goes on too long. I think it's a desperate sort of convulsion in desperate circumstances, which helps a little."
"I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that's the soul seeking some relief."
