“His jest shall savour but a shallow wit, when thousands more weep than did laugh it.”

“816. Women laugh when they can and weepe when they will.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

“A single Voltaire will do more honor to France than a thousand pedants, a thousand false wits, a thousand great men of inferior order.”

Frederick II of Prussia (1712–1786) king of Prussia

“Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and, you weep alone.”

Элла Уилер Уилкокс (1850–1919)

“An eccentric, gangling man, whose sardonic wit somewhat compensated for his shallow mind.”

Ernst Hanfstaengl (1887–1975) German businessman

“But fate, as Merlin always taught us, is inexorable. Life is a jest of the Gods, Merlin liked to claim, and there is no justice. You must learn to laugh, he once told me, or else you'll just weep yourself to death.”

Bernard Cornwell book The Winter King

“Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfish to seek other than itself.”

Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese artist, poet, and writer

“When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

“I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained; man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

“When you trick people into laughing at themselves, that's wit. If you don't laugh at yourself, everything becomes heavy.”

Jim Henson (1936–1990) American puppeteer