Famous Quotes & Sayings

Reinhold Niebuhr

The intimate relation between humor and faith is derived from the fact that both deal with the incongruities of our existence. Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially. Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence, which threaten the very meaning of our life.

Reinhold Niebuhr

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

Rhonda Byrne

Laughter attracts joy, releases negativity, and leads to miraculous cures.

Paramahansa Yogananda

Be inwardly ever newly joyous, like the ever-fresh laughing waters of a gurgling brook.

Oscar Hammerstein II

The last time I saw Paris, her heart was warm and gay, I heard the laughter of her heart in every street café.

P. C. Cast

They're Twin-like," Shaunee said. "Hilarious," Erin agreed. "Shut up!" Aphrodite and Stevie Rae said together, which made the Twins convulse into laughter.

Paul McCartney

Sadness isn't sadness. It's happiness in a black jacket. Tears are not tears. They're balls of laughter dipped in salt. Death is not death. It's life that's jumped off a tall cliff.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I am convinced that there can be no regeneration of mankind until laughter is put down.

Mel Brooks

Dom DeLuise was a big man in every way. He was big in size and created big laughter and joy.

Mel Brooks

Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you.

The soul will bring forth Person if God laughs into her and she laughs back to him. To speak in parable, the Father laughs into the Son and the Son laughs back to the Father; and this laughter breeds liking and liking breeds joy, and joy begets love, and love begets Person, and Person begets the Holy Ghost.

Mary Oliver

Sometimes I spend all day trying to count the leaves on a single tree... Of course I have to give up, but by then I'm half crazy with the wonder of it--the abundance of the leaves, the quietness of the branches, the hopelessness of my effort. And I am in that delicious and important place, roaring with laughter, full of earth-praise.

Martin Amis

Laughter always forgives.

Martin Amis

Amis is acutely, vibrantly sensitive to the different registers of laughter. He knows that it can be the most affirming and uniquely human sound, and also the most sinister and animalistic one. He understands every note of every octave that separates the liberating shout of mirth from the cackle of a bully or the snigger of a sadist.

Pierre Beaumarchais

I make myself laugh at everything, so that I do not weep.

Pierre Beaumarchais

I quickly laugh at everything for fear of having to cry.

Peter McWilliams

Although a lot can be learned from adversity, most of the same lessons can be learned through laughter and joy.

Peter McWilliams

Laughter is essential to our equilibrium, to our well-being, to our aliveness. If we're not well, laughter helps us get well. If we are well, laughter helps us stay that way.

Peta Wilson

I've made a lot of grown men cry with laughter, because I really am quite the joke.

Quintilian

Sayings designed to raise a laugh are generally untrue and never complimentary. Laughter is never far removed from derision.

Quincy Jones

I've always thought that a big laugh is a really loud noise from the soul saying, "Ain't that the truth."

Pliny the Elder

To laugh, if but for an instant only, has never been granted to man before the fortieth day from his birth, and then it is looked upon as a miracle of precocity.

Victor Borge

Occasionally, a finger comes up to wipe a tear [of laughter] from the eye... and that's my reward... the rest goes to the government.

Victor Borge

What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul. Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.

Robert Benchley

All laughter is a muscular rigidity spasmodically relieved by involuntary twitching.

Rita Mae Brown

I'm beginning to feel that the real endangered species on planet earth are not the whales and the elephants but those of us who can laugh at the world and ourselves. ... I fear the dry turn of the American mind, this focus on the literal, as much as I fear our capacity for self-destruction. We've become hagridden by facts, obsessed with product instead of process. Where's the energetic wit, the looney outlook, the frivolity, the lightness of comforting laughter? It has become fashionable to know and unfashionable to feel, and you can't really laugh if you can't feel.

Rick Moody

God howls with laughter at earthly plans, you know?

Robert McKee

In comedy laughter settles all arguments.

Robert McKee

Night after night, through years of performing and directing, I've stood in awe of the audience, of its capacity for response. As if by magic, masks fall away, faces become vulnerable, receptive. Filmgoers do not defend their emotions, rather they open to the storyteller in ways even their lovers never know, welcoming laughter, tears, terror, rage, compassion, passion, love, hate--the ritual often exhausts them.

Walt Whitman

Day full-blown and splendid-day of the immense sun, action, ambition, laughter, The Night follows close with millions of suns, and sleep and restoring darkness.

Saul Alinsky

Life is an adventure of passion, risk, danger, laughter, beauty, love; a burning curiosity to go with the action to see what it is all about, to go search for a pattern of meaning, to burn one's bridges because you're never going to go back anyway, and to live to the end.

Roger Ebert

I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting.

Rod Parsley

The secular world looks to the church and to its chagrin, finds no love, no life, no laughter, no hope and no happiness.