Quotes · Skopia

Every quote has been curated by hand and carefully authenticated.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.

11 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Laughter✕clear

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is stuck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.

William Hazlitt

1818

★ 5.0

Novel · Satirical fiction · Satire

To laugh is proper to man.

Francois Rabelais

Gargantua and Pantagruel · 1534

★ 4.7

Scripture · Religious literature

Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; and the end of that mirth is heaviness.

Proverbs 14:13

686 BC

★ 3.7

Play

The world has always laughed at its own tragedies, that being the only way in which it has been able to bear them.

Oscar Wilde

A Woman of No Importance · 1893

★ 3.7

Novel

There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.

Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol · 1843

★ 2.3

Letter

Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.

Charles Lamb

1815

★ 1.9

Philosophical literature

Of all days, the one most surely wasted is the one on which one has not laughed.

Nicolas Chamfort

1796

★ 1.9

Humour is, in fact, a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer.

Reinhold Niebuhr

1946

★ 1.9

Play · Comedy (play)

Frame your mind to mirth and merriment, Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.

William Shakespeare

The Taming of the Shrew · 1594

★ 1.3

Novel

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

Mark Twain

The Mysterious Stranger · 1910

★ 1.3

Essay

Strange, when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.

Max Beerbohm

1920

★ 0.8

Sourced and curated.