Quotes about laughter
A collection of quotes on the topic of laughter, likeness, life, laugh.
Best quotes about laughter

“Laugh at death and die of laughter.”
Attributed

“Laughter is sunshine, it chases winter from the human face.”
Variant: A smile is the same as sunshine; it banishes winter from the human countenance.
Source: Les Misérables

“You have as much laughter as you have faith.”

“Without the laughter, there would be no Tao.”
Source: Tao Te Ching, Ch. 41
Context: Scholars of the highest class, when they hear about the Tao, take it and practice it earnestly.
Scholars of the middle class, when they hear of it, take it half earnestly.
Scholars of the lowest class, when they hear of it, laugh at it.
Without the laughter, there would be no Tao.

“The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.”
Variant: The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in heaven.

“Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.”
"The Chronicle of Young Satan" (ca. 1897–1900, unfinished), published posthumously in Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (1969), ed. William Merriam Gibson ( pp. 165–166 http://books.google.com/books?id=LDvA2xcYZKcC&pg=PA165 in the 2005 paperback printing, ).
Source: The Mysterious Stranger and Other Curious Tales
Context: Your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug,—push it a little—crowd it a little—weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.

“You don't need to travel, laughter is an instant vacation”
Variant: Laughter is an instant vacation.
Quotes about laughter

From an article in Sovetskoye Iskusstvo, November 5, 1934; translation from Laurel Fay Shostakovich: A Life (2000) p. 77.

As quoted in Christian Jazz Artists Newsletter (February/March 2005) http://www.songsofdavid.com/CJAFebMarch2005.htm; this source is disputed as it does not cite an original document for the quote.
Disputed

“Joy, with peace, is the sister of charity. Serve the Lord with laughter.”

Speech to the Reichstag, 30 January 1939, as quoted at The History Place http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/threat.htm.
1930s

The Gift of Living With the Not Gifted http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-gift-of-living-with-the-not-gifted-1428103079 Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2015
From interviews and talks

St. 18
To a Skylark (1821)
Source: The Complete Poems

“Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one.”
Variant: Laughter is not a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is the best ending for one.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

Michael Landon, in Little House on the Prairie (TV series), Season 2, Ep 8 (5 November 1975) "Remember Me", Part 1
Misattributed

Source: Blackbird Singing: Poems and Lyrics, 1965-1999

“The laughter of the world is merely loneliness pathetically trying to reassure itself.”
Source: The Neal A. Maxwell Quote Book

"Recipe of life" video clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7iPACdA1HQ
Interview with David Frost (1974)

“There's nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter and the love of friends.”
"Dedicatory Ode", stanza 22
Verses (1910)
Context: 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.

“I remember it so clearly —
how people, seeing me, would break off in midword.
Laughter died.”
"Soliloquy for Cassandra"
Poems New and Collected (1998), No End of Fun (1967)
Context: I remember it so clearly —
how people, seeing me, would break off in midword.
Laughter died.
Lovers' hands unclasped.
Children ran to their mothers.
I didn't even know their short-lived names.
And that song about a little green leaf —
no one ever finished it near me.
“Laughter rises out of tragedy when you need it the most, and rewards you for your courage.”

“The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter.”

To S J Perelman about his book Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge (1929), as quoted in LIFE (9 February 1962)

Source: The Great God Brown and Other Plays

“Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.”
Source: Shantaram


Source: http://www.tcj.com/tezuka-osamu-and-american-comics/ Tezuka Osamu and American Comics

Conversation, New York, April 12, 1969 PrabhupadaBooks.com http://prabhupadabooks.com/conversations/1969/apr/new_york/april/12/1969?d=1
Quotes from other Sources, Quotes from other Sources: Violence and Dictatorship

The Other World (1657)

"The Defence Remains Open!" (April 1921), published in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 54
Non-Fiction

History of the Thirty Years War - Volume II
The Thirty Years War
“The laughter of the aphorism is sometimes triumphant, but seldom carefree.”
City Aphorisms, Sixth Selection (1989)

Four Riddles, no. III
Rhyme? and Reason? (1883)

“Laughter would be bereaved if snobbery died.”
As quoted in The Observer (13 March 1955)

The remarks concerned the presidential election of 1880.
As quoted in The New York Times (12 February 1881).
1880s

Mahfouz (1957) Palace of Desire Part II; Cited in Matt Schudel " Leading Arab Novelist Gave Streets a Voice http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/30/AR2006083000475.html" in: Washington Post, August 31, 2006

Interview Public Radio International (October 2006)
Various interviews

“Laughter is the best medicine, y'know, besides medicine.”
Words, Words, Words (2010)

Je suis le fou de Pampelune,
J'ai peur du rire de la Lune,
Cafarde, avec son crêpe noir...
Horreur ! tout est donc sous un éteignoir.
Heures, http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Heures second stanza, from Les Amours jaunes (1873).

“Laughter is Humanity's mechanism to escape suffering.”
"Iconoclasts" Sundance Channel Original Series episode 3.03 (Original Air Date: 8 November 2007)

"Nationalism in the West", 1917. Reprinted in Rabindranath Tagore and Mohit K. Ray, Essays (2007, p. 489). Also cited in Parmanand Parashar, Nationalism: Its Theory and Principles in India (1996, p. 213-14).

History of the Indies (1561)
A Marriage Made In Heaven; or, Too Tired For an Affair (1993)
The Revel: Time of the Famine and Plague in India, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919); alternately attributed to Alfred Domett.

Remarks to the National Council of La Raza (25 July 2011) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/07/25/remarks-president-national-council-la-raza
2011

http://books.google.com/books?id=feWS3EhzaRwC&q=%22laughter+is+a+form+of+internal+jogging+It+moves+your+internal+organs+around+It+enhances+respiration+It+is+an+igniter+of+great+expectations%22&pg=PA217#v=onepage
Human Options (1981)

“Directly the mulberry tree begins to make you circle, break off. Pelt the tree with laughter.”
Source: Three Guineas (1938), Ch. 2, p. 80

"Palm Sunday", a sermon delivered at St. Clement's Church, New York City (ndg), originally published in The Nation as "Hypocrites You Always Have With You" (ndg)
Palm Sunday (1981)
Context: 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.

“To say more than this would only cause weeping and laughter.”
As quoted in The Life of Milarepa: A New Translation from the Tibetan (1977) by Tsangnyön Heruka, as translated by Lobsang P. Lhalungpa, p. 12
Context: In my youth I committed black deeds. In maturity I practised innocence. Now, released from both good and evil, I have destroyed the root of karmic action and shall have no reason for action in the future. To say more than this would only cause weeping and laughter. What good would it do to tell you? I am an old man. Leave me in peace.

The Humanist interview (2012)
Context: There were never that many women stand-up comics in the past because the power to make people laugh is also a power that gets people upset. But the ones who were performing were making jokes on themselves usually and now that’s changed. So there are no rules exactly but I think if you see a whole group of people only being self-deprecating, it’s a problem.
But I have always employed humor, and I think it’s absolutely crucial that we do because, among other things, humor is the only free emotion. I mean, you can compel fear, as we know. You can compel love, actually, if somebody is isolated and dependent — it’s like the Stockholm syndrome. But you can’t compel laughter. It happens when two things come together and make a third unexpectedly. It happens when you learn something, too. I think it was Einstein who said he had to be careful when he shaved because if he thought of something suddenly, he’d laugh and cut himself.
So I think laughter is crucial. Some of the original cultures, like the Dalit and the Native American, don’t separate laughter and seriousness. There’s none of this kind of false Episcopalian solemnity.

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI
Context: We have the divinity of our great misery. And our solitude, with its toilsome ideas, tears and laughter, is fatally divine. However wrong we may go in the dark, whatever our efforts in the dark and the useless work of our hearts working incessantly, and whatever our ignorance left to itself, and whatever the wounds that other human beings are, we ought to study ourselves with a sort of devotion. It is this sentiment that lights our foreheads, uplifts our souls, adorns our pride, and, in spite of everything, will console us when we shall become accustomed to holding, each at his own poor task, the whole place that God used to occupy. The truth itself gives an effective, practical, and, so to speak, religious caress to the suppliant in whom the heavens spread.

"The Chronicle of Young Satan" (ca. 1897–1900, unfinished), published posthumously in Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (1969), ed. William Merriam Gibson ( pp. 165–166 http://books.google.com/books?id=LDvA2xcYZKcC&pg=PA165 in the 2005 paperback printing, ISBN 0520246950)

As quoted in Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (2009), p. 64

“When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.”
Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
“Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down.”
Source: Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
Source: On the Jellicoe Road