Finding the whimsical, incongruous and unexpected. Being able to laugh at oneself.
Laugh a little!
“If you can laugh at it, you can live with it.”
Erma Bombeck
“Laugh at yourself first, before anyone else can.”
Elsa Maxwell
“Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.”
Victor Borge
“It is not enough to possess wit. One must have enough of it to avoid having too much.”
Andre Maurois
“The most wasted day is that in which we have not laughed.”
Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
“I’d rather be a failure at something I enjoy than be a success at something I hate.”
George Burns
“People are at their most mindful when they are at play. If we find ways of enjoying our work—blurring the lines between work and play—the gains will be greater.”
Ellen Langer
“Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and some pure foolishness.”
May Sarton
“Fun is about as good a habit as there is.”
Jimmy Buffet
“Take time every day to do something silly.”
Philipa Walker
“You can increase your brain power three to fivefold simply by laughing and having fun before working on a problem.”
Doug Hall
“Don’t take life too seriously, for you may pass a good laugh along the way!”
Keith Gusich
“Laughter is the music of life.”
Sir William Osler
“Fun is going to enhance interest, because people don’t feel incompetent when they’re having fun.”
Matthew S. Richter
“You grow up the day you have your first real laugh at yourself.”
Ethel Barrymore
“Humor comes from self-confidence. There’s an aggressive element to wit.”
Rita Mae Brown
“He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh.”
The Koran
“He who laughs, lasts.”
Mary Pettibone Poole
“Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.”
Sir Francis Bacon
“A day without laughter is a day wasted.”
Charlie Chaplin
“Were it not for my little jokes, I could not bear the burdens of this office.”
Abraham Lincoln
“You can think best when you’re happiest.”
Peter Thomson, Australian Golfer
“A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs—jolted by every pebble in the road.”
Henry Ward Beecher
“Humor has a way of bringing people together. It unites people. In fact, I’m rather serious when I suggest that someone should plant a few whoopee cushions in the United Nations.”
Ron Dentinger
“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 Vonnegut
“I think the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humor in it.”
Frank A. Clark
“A good laugh is sunshine in a house.”
William Makepeace Thackeray
“Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.”
Ken Kesey
“At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.”
Jean Houston
“Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.”
Christopher Morley
“The kind of humor I like is the thing that makes me laugh for five seconds and think for ten minutes.”
William Davis
“Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritation and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.”
Mark Twain
“Warning: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.”
Ellie Katz
“Joy in one’s heart and some laughter on one’s lips is a sign that the person down deep has a pretty good grasp of life.”
Hugh Sidey
“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“A good laugh is good for both the mental and physical digestion.”
Abraham Lincoln
“A man isn’t poor if he can still laugh.”
Raymond Hitchcock
“What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul.”
Yiddish proverb
“There is no defense against adverse fortune which is so effectual as an habitual sense of humor.”
Thomas W. Higginson
“Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully.”
Max Eastman
“People who laugh actually live longer than those who don’t laugh. Few persons realize that health actually varies according to the amount of laughter.”
James J. Walsh
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny …'”
Isaac Asimov
“Time spent laughing is time spent with the Gods.”
Japanese proverb
“If you don’t have wrinkles, you haven’t laughed enough.”
Phyllis Diller
“Shared laughter is like family glue. It is the stuff of family well-being and all-is-well thoughts. It brings us together as few other things can.”
Valerie Bell, author
“Humor is an affirmation of man’s dignity, a declaration of man’s superiority to all that befalls him.”
Romain Cary
“Humor is not a postscript or an incidental afterthought; it is a serious and weighty part of the world’s economy. One feels increasingly the height of the faculty in which it arises, the nobility of things associated with it, and the greatness of services it renders.”
-Oscar W. Firkin: Memoirs and Letters
“Wit is the lowest form of humor.”
Alexander Pope, “Essay on Criticism”
“Humor can help you to disagree without being disagreeable. The key in democracy is not necessarily that we agree, but that we participate…Despite all the heavy problems—domestic and international—there is humor. Humor transcends partisanship.”
Gerald Ford
“Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.”
Agnes Repplier, Points of View
“This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.”
Lin Yutang
“Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.”
Robert Benchley
“Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine.”
Lord Byron, poet
“Laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects.”
Arnold Glasow
“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.”
Dr. Seuss
“Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.”
Mark Twain
“Laughter is the language of the Gods.”
Buddhist saying
“There are three things which are real: God, human folly, and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension, so we must do what we can with the third.”
John F. Kennedy
“A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
“One does not laugh because one is happy; one is happy because one laughs.”
Mireille Guiliano
“Laughter is wine for the soul—laugh soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness.
Comedy and tragedy step through life together, arm in arm…
Once we can laugh, we can live.”
Sean O’Casey, Irish playwright
“The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.”
Nicholas Murray Butler
“Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”
Dorothy Parker
“I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.”
George Carlin, comedian, actor
“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”
William James
“Laughter is an instant vacation.”
Milton Berle
“When people are laughing, they’re generally not killing each other.”
Alan Alda, actor
“Silly is you in a natural state, and serious is something you have to do until you can get silly again.”
Mike Myers, actor
“To enhance my performance, I laugh a lot. I think laughter is the best remedy for everything.”
Tricia Byrnes, Olympic snowboarder
“To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone.”
Reba McEntire,, singer and entertainer
“Humor is a rubber sword—it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.”
Mary Hirsch, author, humorist
“You can’t deny laughter. When it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.”
Stephen King
“All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.”
Charles M. Schulz
“Laughter rises out of tragedy, when you need it the most, and rewards you for your courage.”
Erma Bombeck, humorist and writer
“In the end, everything is a gag.”
Charlie Chaplin
“You don’t stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop laughing.”
Michael Pritchard, motivational speaker
“The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.”
H. G. Wells
“Humor is just another defense against the universe.”
Mel Brooks
“We are all here for a spell, get all the good laughs you can.”
Will Rogers
“I have seen what a laugh can do. It can transform almost unbearable tears into something bearable, even hopeful.”
Bob Hope
“Laughter is by definition healthy.”
Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize in Literature recipient
“Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.”
James Thurber, American humorist and cartoonist
“You can’t stay mad at somebody who makes you laugh.”
Jay Leno
“I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out my nose.”
Woody Allen
“The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.”
e.e. cummings
“Mix a little foolishness with your prudence: It’s good to be silly at the right moment.”
Horace, Roman poet
“When humor goes, there goes civilization.”
Erma Bombeck, American humorist
“Next to power without honor, the most dangerous thing in the world is power without humor.”
Eric Sevareid, American broadcast journalist
“Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.”
Langston Hughes, American poet
“Laughter is by definition healthy.”
Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize in Literature recipient
“A sense of humor is a major defense against minor troubles.”
Mignon McLaughlin, journalist and author
“Laugh and the world laughs with you; snore and you sleep alone.”
Anthony Burgess, English writer and composer
“When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.”
George Bernard Shaw
“The unselfish effort to bring cheer to others will be the beginning of a happier life for ourselves.”
Helen Keller
“Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it.”
Jules Renard, French author
“If you don’t learn to laugh at trouble, you won’t have anything to laugh at when you are old.”
Will Rogers
“If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher
“All higher humor begins with ceasing to take oneself seriously.”
Hermann Hesse
“It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour.”
Charles Dickens
“Laugh at yourself once in awhile; give yourself a break.”
Greg Evans, American cartoonist
“Where there is laughter there is always more health than sickness.”
Phyllis Bottome, British writer
“It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.”
Freeman Dyson, British-American physicist and mathematician
“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: All of them make me laugh.”
W.H. Auden
“It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.”
Max Eastman, American writer, philosopher and activist
“Laughter is the fireworks of the soul.”
Josh Billings
