quotes, quotations and passages on laughter

Laughter is the shortest distance
between two people.

Victor Borge

If you go to bed at night and think about your day and you haven't laughed very much, then you must jump out of bed and go do something fun. Marlo Morgan Shared laughter creates a bond of friendship. When people laugh together, they cease to be young and old, master and pupils, worker and driver. They have become a single group of human beings, enjoying their existence. W. Grant Lee

A laugh lifestyle is predicated upon our attitude toward the daily stuff of life. When those tasks seem too dull to endure, figure out a way to make them fun; get creative and entertain yourself. If the stuff of life for you right now is not dull and boring but instead painful and overwhelming, find something in the midst of the pain that makes you smile or giggle anyway. There's always something somewhere. . . even if you have to just pretend to laugh until you really do! Marilyn Meberg

Laughter can relieve tension, soothe the pain of disappointment, and strengthen the spirit for the formidable tasks that always lie ahead. Dwight D. Eisenhower

Whatever it is probably won't go away, so we might as well live and laugh through it. When we double over laughing, we're bending so we won't break. If you think your particular troubles are too heavy and too traumatic to laugh about, remember that laughing is like changing a baby's diaper. It doesn't solve any problems permanently, but it makes things more acceptable for awhile. Barbara Johnson

A keen sense of humor helps us to overlook the unbecoming, understand
the unconventional, tolerate the unpleasant, overcome
the unexpected, and outlast the unbeatable.

Billy Graham

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Always laugh when you can; it is cheap medicine.
Merriment is a philosophy not well understood.
It is the sunny side of existence.

George Gordon Noel Byron

I want to make people laugh--so they will begin
to see things seriously.

William Zinser

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.

Victor Hugo

We know the degree of refinement in people by
the matter they laugh at and the ring of the laugh.

George Meredith

A clown may be the first in the kingdom of heaven,
if he or she has helped lessen the sadness of human life.

Rabbi Baroka

The most valuable sense of humor is the kind that enables
a person to see instantly what it isn't safe to laugh at.

Anon

The young person who has not wept is a savage,
and the old one who will not laugh is a fool.

George Santayana

From quiet homes and first beginning,
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There's nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter and the love of friends.

Hillaire Belloc

I have known sorrow--therefore I
May laugh with you, O friend, more merrily
Than those who never sorrowed upon earth
And know not laughter's worth.

I have known laughter--therefore I
May sorrow with you far more tenderly
Than those who never guess how sad a thing
Seems merriment to one heart's suffering.

Theodosia Garrison

Teach us delight in simple things,
And Mirth that has no bitter springs;
Forgiveness free of evil done,
And Love to all men 'neath the sun.

Rudyard Kipling

We cannot really love anybody
with whom we never laugh.

Agnes Repplier

Get into the habit of laughing; too many of us have forgotten how to laugh.
As people grow older, they sometimes forget that they ever laughed. It is
a part of their childhood that they can no longer remember.

Maxwell Maltz

Humans are the only animal that laughs and weeps; for they are the
only animal that is struck with the difference between
what things are and what they might have been.

William Hazlitt

With the fearful strain that is on me day and night,
if I did not laugh, I should die.

Abraham Lincoln

laughter and humor

Strange, when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk
who have lived before our time on this planet, not one is
known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.

Max Beerbohm

Those who have the courage to laugh
are almost as much the master of the world
as those who are ready to die.

Giacomo Leopardi

Laughter is the language of the soul.

Pablo Neruda

It better befits us to laugh at life than to lament over it.

Seneca

I am especially glad of the divine gift of laughter: it has made
the world human and lovable, despite all its pain and wrong.

W.E.B. DuBois

Laughter has something in it common with the ancient words of faith and
inspiration; it unfreezes pride and unwinds secrecy; it makes people forget
themselves in the presence of something greater than themselves.

G.K. Chesterton

Those who can't laugh at themselves leave the job to others.

anon

Humor is a bit like Mary Poppins' sugar--it helps the medicine go down.
A little bit of humor allows people to think about very difficult subjects.

James Fadiman

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The greatest prayer you could ever pray would be to laugh every
day. For when you do, it elevates the vibratory frequency within
your being such that you could heal your entire body.

Ramtha

Nothing shows our character more than what we laugh at.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The faculty of laughter is not in the brain but in the heart.

Laurent Joubert

The most completely lost of all days is the one on which we have not laughed.

Nicolas Chamfort

laughter and humor

There are times for all of us when all the laughter seems to be gone, but
we should not permit these periods to last too long. When we’ve lost our
sense of humor, there isn’t very much left. We become ridiculous. We
must then go to war against the whole world, and that’s a war we cannot win.

Earl Nightingale

Honest good humor is the oil and wine of a merry meeting, and there
is no jovial companionship equal to that where the jokes
are rather small and the laughter abundant.

Washington Irving

Norman Cousins was in his late forties when he was diagnosed with severe arthritis. He needed painkillers to get through the day, and sleeping pills to sleep at night. And his doctors told him that his days were numbered.

Cousins remembered reading somewhere that stress and painful emotions might negatively affect the immune system. At the time, this was merely a hypothesis, but Cousins was convinced that it was true. Armed with his conviction, he decided to do battle with his disease. He left the hospital and began his own self-prescribed alternative treatment whose main component was laughter. He watched Marx Brothers movies and hired a nurse to read him funny stories. He soon discovered that after enjoying a dose of belly laughter, he was free of pain for a couple of hours. Eventually, the treatment was so successful that he was completely off sleeping pills and painkillers and returned to work.

It took the scientific community years to catch up with Cousins’s findings. Today you can find countless studies that illustrate how laughter can alleviate pain and strengthen the immune system. Through the tireless work of Patch Adams, the medical clown, and many others around the world, humor has been embraced as an important component of the healing process.

You don’t need the excuse of illness to bring more humor to your life and enjoy higher levels of happiness, better relationships, and improved health. Introduce levity into your days: Watch a favorite TV program, read jokes on the Internet, or meet up with a friend who makes you laugh.

Tal Ben-Shahar
Choose the Life You Want

From the spiritual side:

Humor is a prelude to faith and
Laughter is the beginning of prayer.

Reinhold Niebuhr

If there is not laughter in intimacy, it becomes heavy, burdensome, and
dull. At my best moments, the love dialogue I try to carry on with You
each day is comic--what could be more comic than a human addressing
the Ground of Being as an intimate? It's a kind of blasphemy that I dare
because you have called for it, and that is pretty humorous, too.

Andrew M. Greeley
Love Affair: A Prayer Journal

Of all the things God created, I am often most grateful He created laughter.

Charles Swindoll