Famous Quotes & Sayings

Joseph Addison

If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter. He has a heart capable of mirth, and naturally disposed to it.

Joseph Addison

Laughter, while it lasts, slackens and unbraces the mind, weakens the faculties, and causes a kind of remissness and dissolution in all the powers of the soul.

Joseph Addison

Man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.

Jose Saramago

...sometimes we ask ourselves why happiness took so long to arrive, why it didn't come sooner, but appears suddenly, as now, when we've given up hope of it ever arriving, it's likely then that we won't know what to do, and rather than it being a question of choosing between laughter and tears, we will be filled by a secret anxiety to which we might not know how to respond at all.

Joni Mitchell

Inside your own self pity there you swim, in sinking down to drown her voice still haunts you, and only with your laughter can you win.

Kevin Spacey

You've got to trust the ground you're standing on and the work you've done in telling your story. The goal should be to bring those thousands of people - viewers - together and make them one. When you feel that happening, it's usually in silence, not applause or laughter.

John Cage

There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don’t have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure.

Mahatma Gandhi

Genuine laughter is true eloquence and more effective than speech

James Thurber

Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.

James Thurber

Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.

James Thurber

The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms -hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.

James Thurber

We are a nation that has always gone in for the loud laugh, the wow, the yak, the belly laugh, and the dozen other labels for the roll- em-in-the-aisles gagerissimo. This is the kind of laugh that delights actors, directors, and producers, but dismays writers of comedy because it is the laugh that often dies in the lobby. The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.

James Thurber

Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.

James Monroe

During the darkest days of the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress and George Washington - I call him the first George W. - (laughter and applause) - urged citizens to pray and to give thanks and to ask for God's protection.

Edward St Aubyn

I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn't it?

Holly Black

So what are you really wearing?" The words left her mouth before she could consider them. She winced. He didn't seem to mind; in fact, he flashed her one of his brief smiles. "And if I said nothing at all?" "Then I would point out that sometimes, if you look at something out of the corner of your eye, you can see right through glamour," she returned. That brought surprised laughter. "What a relief to us both then that I am actually wearing exactly what you saw me in this afternoon. Although one might point out that in that outfit, your last concern should be my modesty.

Henri Nouwen

Joy and laughter are the gifts of living in the presence of God and trusting that tomorrow is not worth worrying about.

Heinrich Heine

Laughter is wholesome. God is not so dull as some people make out. Did not He make the kitten to chase its tail.

Hilaire Belloc

Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, There’s always laughter and good red wine. At least I’ve always found it so. Benedicamus Domino!

Henryk Sienkiewicz

Amid the stillness of the night, in the depths of the ravine, from the direction in which the corpses lay suddenly resounded a kind of inhuman, frightful laughter in which quivered despair, and joy, and cruelty, and suffering, and pain, and sobbing, and derision; the heart-rending and spasmodic laughter of the insane or condemned.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

Life deserves laughter, hence people laugh at it.

Henry Ward Beecher

Mirth is God's medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in it.

Henry Ward Beecher

Grim care, moroseness, anxiety-all this rust of life ought to be scoured off by the oil of mirth. Mirth is God's medicine.

Henry James

...he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

The immoderate cannot laugh moderately.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

And still, laughter is akin to weeping.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

He who always prefaces his tale with laughter, is poised between impertinence and folly.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

Him, who incessantly laughs in the street, you may commonly hear grumbling in his closet.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Say what you will of fortitude, but show me the man who can patiently endure the laughter of fools when they have obtained an advantage over him. 'Tis only when their nonsense is without foundation that one can suffer it without complaint.

Khalil Gibran

I would not exchange the sorrows of my heart for the joys of the multitude. And I would not have the tears that sadness makes to flow from my every part turn into laughter. I would that my life remain a tear and a smile.

Khalil Gibran

The tears that you spill, the sorrowful, are sweeter than the laughter of snobs and the guffaws of scoffers.

Jonathan Safran Foer

I'm grateful for anything that reminds me of what's possible in this life. Books can do that. Films can do that. Music can do that. School can do that. It's so easy to allow one day to simply follow into the next, but every once in a while we encounter something that shows us that anything is possible, that dramatic change is possible, that something new can be made, that laughter can be shared.

Home is heaven and orgies are vile, But I like an orgy, once in a while.