"What is this precious love and laughter budding in our hearts? It is the glorious sound of a soul waking up!"
-- Hafiz
"Be inwardly ever newly joyous, like the ever-fresh laughing waters of a gurgling brook."
-- Paramahaa Yogananda
“What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul."
-- Yiddish Proverb
"When you laugh, aside from the endorphin rush, there's also a spiritual opening. You're not so tight inside yourself. That opening I've found to be a real gift, in people being able to absorb spirituality."
--Rabbi Sydney Mintz
"Man thinks and god laughs."
--Yiddish Proverb
“Blessed is he who makes his companions laugh.”
-- The Koran
“Except ye be as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
--Jesus
"If you're not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don't want to go there."
--Martin Luther (1483-1546)
"It's one thing to say, 'I don't fear death', but to laugh out loud somehow drives the idea home. It embodies our theology."
--Rev. Laura Gentry
"But it certainly is a wonderful thing to wake up suddenly in the solitude of the woods and look up at the sky and see the utter nonsense of everything including all the solemn stuff given out by professional asses about the spiritual life; and simply to burst out laughing, and laugh and laugh, with the sky and the trees because God is not in words, and not in systems, and not in liturgical movements, and not in "contemplation" with a big "C," or in asceticism or in anything like that, not even in the apostolate."
--Thomas Merton, Trappist monk
"Time spent laughing is time spent with the gods."
--Japanese proverb
“When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky."
-- Buddha
"If you become silent after your laughter, one day you will hear God also laughing, you will hear the whole existence laughing -- trees and stones and stars with you."
-- Osho
“The point is seeing that THIS -- the immediate, everyday and present experience -- is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe. I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter..."
-- Alan Watts
"I would not exchange the laughter of my heart for the fortunes of the multitudes; nor would I be content with converting my tears, invited by my agonized self, into calm. It is my fervent hope that my whole life on this earth will ever be tears and laughter. Tears that purify my heart and reveal to me the secret of life and its mystery, Laughter that brings me closer to my fellow men; Tears with which I join the broken-hearted, Laugher that symbolizes joy over my very existence."
-- Kahlil Gibran
"Laugh my friend, for laughter ignites a fire within the pit of your belly and awakens your being."
--Stella & Blake
"The whole play of existence is so beautiful that laughter can be the only response to it. Only laughter can be the real prayer, gratitude."
--Osho
“In some respects, if I had to choose just one (virtue on the spiritual path), I’d feel safest with a sense of humor. We pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, have a good laugh about human nature, and get on with our journeys.”
--Bo Lozoff (Prison-Ashram Project)
“Sometimes when I am alone in my room in the dark, I practice smiling to myself. I do this to be kind to myself, to take good care of myself, to love myself. I know that if I cannot take care of myself, I cannot take care of anyone else.”
--Thich Nhat Han
"In a few Zen monasteries, every monk has to start his morning with laughter, and has to end his night with laughter -- the first thing and the last thing! You try it. . . For no reason! Because there is no reason. Simply, you are again there, still alive -- it is a miracle!"
--Osho
Literary Laughter
"With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come."
--William Shakespeare
"Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything."
--Kurt Vonnegut
"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter."
--e.e. cummings
"Laughter is the sun that drives winter from a human face."
--Victor Hugo
"Earth laughs in flowers."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Laugh because that is the purest sound.”
--Hafiz
"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
"The old man laughed loud and joyously, shook up the details of his anatomy from head to foot, and ended by saying that such a laugh was money in the man's pocket, because it cut down the doctor's bills like everything."
--"Tom Sawyer" (Mark Twain)
Other laughter quotes
"The first half of life is learning to be an adult—the second half is learning to be a child."
--Pablo Picasso
"Laughter is the shortest distance between two people."
--Victor Borge
"With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die."
--Abraham Lincoln
"I have been confronted with many difficulties throughout the course of my life, and my country is going through a critical period. But I laugh often, and my laughter is contagious. When people ask me how I find the strength to laugh now, I reply that I am a professional laugher."
--The Dalai Lama
"Laughter connects you with people. It's almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you're just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy."
--John Cleese
"We're in pain, of course, but to cheer ourselves up we get together and laugh from the bottom of our hearts. At any moment, we're scared. But at least this way, if there's another earthquake and I'm killed, I won't die alone."
--Kunimas Nakata, Earthquake survivors sitting around a campfire, Kobe, Japan.
"Laughter is a form of internal jogging. It moves your internal organs around. It enhances respiration. It is an igniter of great expectations."
--Norman Cousins
"Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind (humankind) is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth"
--Aristotle
"At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities."
--Jean Houston
"Strange when you come to think of it, that of all countless folk who have lived on this planet, not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter."
--Sir Max Beerbohm
"When we laugh together, there is instantaneous recognition of "sameness" even in the midst of vast differences."
--Rebecca Foster :-)
___ from http://thecenterofjoy.net/
