Quotes about laughter

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.

“Maturity,” Bokonon tells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”

I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilized music in the world.

My mother ... had a wonderful sense of humor, and I learned from her that the highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.

I grok people. I am people… so now I can say it in people talk. I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much… because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting.

I had thought — I had been told — that a 'funny' thing is a thing of a goodness. It isn't. Not ever is it funny to the person it happens to. Like that sheriff without his pants. The goodness is in the laughing itself. I grok it is a bravery … and a sharing … against pain and sorrow and defeat.

I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.

A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

For the mockers are those who die comically, and God laughs at their comic ending, while the nobler part, the part of tragedy, is theirs who endured the mockery.