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Quotes about laughter

44 quotes from 38 people

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Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.
Mark Twain1835–1910“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 in the 2005 paperback printing, )
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
Victor Hugo1802–1885
You can’t deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.
Stephen Kingborn 1947
There are three things which are real: God, human folly, and laughter. Since the first two pass our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third.
John F. Kennedy1917–1963Aubrey Menen, Rama Retold (1954), p. 231
To laugh with others is one of life’s great pleasures. To be laughed at by others is one of life’s great hurts.
FTFrank Tyger
The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
Nicolas Chamfort1740–1794Often credited to Charlie Chaplin
Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1749–1832
Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
Victor Borge1909–2000
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
Kurt Vonnegut1922–2007
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.
Kurt Vonnegut1922–2007Cat’s Cradle (1963), Chapter 88
- Maturity
No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
Thomas Carlyle1795–1881Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), Bk. I, ch. 4.
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 Hazlitt1778–1830Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819)
Stupid people, people who do not know how to laugh, are always pompous and self-conceited.
William Makepeace Thackeray1811–1863“Mr. Brown’s Letters to His Nephew: On Love, Marriage, Men and Women”, p. 109.
Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.
Václav Havel1936–2011Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 2: Writing for the Stage
- Humor
If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.
Joseph Addison1672–1719The Spectator (1711–1714), No. 494 (26 September 1712)