Only laughter can destroy evil without malice.
If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don’t bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he’s a good man.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don’t bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he’s a good man.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.
—Voltaire
All has gone to rest, and I don’t know whether I’m alive or will live or whether I’m rushing like this through the world for I’m not longer weeping or laughing.
—Taras Shevchenko
I shall laugh my bitter laugh.
—Nikolai Gogol
For public opinion does not admit that lofty rapturous laughter is worthy to stand beside lofty lyrical emotion and that there isall the difference in the world between it and the antics of a clown at a fair.
—Nikolai Gogol
The only intelligent tactical response to life’s horror is to laugh defiantly at it.
—Søren Kierkegaard
When a foolish man hears of the Tao, he laughs out loud.
—Laozi
There exists a kind of laughter which is worthy to be ranked with the higher lyric emotions and is infinitely different from the twitching of a mean merrymaker.
—Nikolai Gogol
What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourself.
—Nikolai Gogol
What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?
—Søren Kierkegaard
There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.
—Charles Dickens
The mirror is my best friend because when I cry it never laughs.
—Charlie Chaplin
With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.
—William Shakespeare
A day without laughing is a day wasted.
—Charlie Chaplin
Life is a play that does not allow testing. So, sing, cry, dance, laugh and live intensely, before the curtain closes and the piece ends with no applause.
—Charlie Chaplin
My pain may be the reason for somebody’s laugh. But my laugh must never be the reason for somebody’s pain.
—Charlie Chaplin
To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it.
—Charlie Chaplin
I believe in the power of laughter and tears as an antidote to hatred and terror.
—Charlie Chaplin
I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone.
—Nikolai Gogol
The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal. – C.S. Lewis
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
—Henry David Thoreau
The earth laughs in flowers.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man’s laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
By making our enemy small, mean, contemptible, comical, we take a roundabout route to getting for ourselves the enjoyment of vanquishing him, which the third person – who has gone to no effort – endorses with his laughter.
—Sigmund Freud
The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards.
—Nikolai Gogol