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It is better to write of laughter than of tears, for laughter is the property of man.
(François Rabelais (1494-1553), French author, evangelist. Prefatory poem, p. 3, Pleiade edition (1995).
Author's apology for book.)
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François Rabelais
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2
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Laughter scares off lust.
(Mason Cooley (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist. City Aphorisms, Ninth Selection, New York (1992).)
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Mason Cooley
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3
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Laughter would be bereaved if snobbery died.
(Peter Ustinov (b. 1921), British actor, writer, director. Quoted in Observer (London, March 13, 1955).)
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Peter Ustinov
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4
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[Humanity] has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.
(Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910), U.S. author. Satan, in The Mysterious Stranger, ch. 10 (1916).)
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Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens]
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5
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Laughter not time destroyed my voice
And put that crack in it,
And when the moon's pot-bellied
I get a laughing fit....
(William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet, playwright. "VII. The Friends of His Youth.")
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William Butler Yeats
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6
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Most near, most dear, most loved and most far,
Under the window where I often found her
Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter,
(George Barker (b. 1913), British poet, novelist, playwright, scriptwriter. Sonnet to My Mother (l. 1-3). . .
Seven Centuries of Poetry; Chaucer to Dylan Thomas. A. N. Jeffares, ed. (1955) Longmans, Green & Company.)
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George Barker
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7
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In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter.
(Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694-1773), British statesman, man of letters. Letter, March 9, 1748, first published (1774). The Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield to His Son, vol. 1, no. 144, ed. Charles Strachey (1901).
In a later letter, Dec. 12, 1765, Chesterfield wrote: "Observe it, the vulgar often laugh, but never smile, whereas well-bred people often smile, and seldom or never laugh. A witty thing never excited laughter, it pleases only the mind and never distorts the countenance." (Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Godson, no. 135, ed. Earl of Carnarvon, 1889).)
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4th Earl Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope
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8
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Nothing can confound
A wise man more than laughter from a dunce.
(George Gordon Noel Byron (1788-1824), British poet. Don Juan, cto. 16, st. 88 (1819-1824).)
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George Gordon Noel Byron
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9
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A man who whinnies with noisy laughter, surpasses all the animals in vulgarity.
(Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher, classical scholar, critic of culture. Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 2, p. 330, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin, de Gruyter (1980). Human, All-Too-Human, "Man Alone With Himself," aphorism 553, "Below the Animals," (1878).)
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Friedrich Nietzsche
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10
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Laughter is ever young, whereas tragedy, except the very highest of all, quickly becomes haggard.
(Margaret Sackville (1881-1963), British poet. The Works of Susan Ferrier, vol. 1, introduction (1929).)
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Margaret Sackville
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Poets
