Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.
—William Hazlitt
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
—Anthony Burgess
Laughter is the closest distance between two people.
—Victor Borge
The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
—e. e. cummings
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
—George Bernard Shaw
There is little success where there is little laughter.
—Andrew Carnegie
Let others laugh when you sacrifice desire to duty, if they will. You have time and eternity to rejoice in.
—Theodore Parker
Sometimes you do have to laugh to keep from crying. And sometimes the world feels all right and good and kind of like it’s becoming nice again around you. And you realize it, and realize how happy you are in it, and you just gotta laugh.
—Jacqueline Woodson in Peace, Locomotion
Laughing at our mistakes can lengthen our own life. Laughing at someone else's can shorten it.
—Cullen Hightower
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
—Dr. Seuss
For all your ills I give you laughter.
—Rabelais
The most solid advice . . . for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
—William Saroyan
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. . . . This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being a member of a race in which God became incarnate. . . . There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
—Thomas Merton
A good laugh is sunshine in the house.
—William Makepeace Thackeray