Laughter Quotes From the Famous

Laugh your way to a healthy life

Young couple laughing together, hugging outdoors

Eternity in an Instant / Digital Vision / Getty Images

Writer Madeleine L’Engle once quipped: "A good laugh heals a lot of hurts." Indeed, CPF, the official journal of the College of Family Physicians of Canada, stated that laughter and humor have great medical benefits. And prescribing laughter is free, the medical organization notes.

It makes sense, then, to find ways to include laughter in your daily life. People who laugh more live longer and happier than worrywarts. These quotes from famous people, great thinkers, and even a few comedians will show you that laughter is no laughing matter. Lighten your life with a chuckle every day.

Audrey Hepburn

"I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it's the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills. It's probably the most important thing in a person."

Henry Ward Beecher

"Beware of him who hates the laugh of a child."

Will Rogers

"An onion can make people cry but there's never been a vegetable that can make people laugh."

Woody Allen

"If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans."

Mary H. Waldrip

"A laugh is a smile that bursts."

Arthur Marshall

"Laugh it off, laugh it off; it's all part of life's rich pageant."

Thomas Szasz

"When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him."

Jonathan Davis

"You laugh at me because I'm different, I laugh at you because you're all the same."

Abraham Lincoln

"With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die."

Charlie Chaplin

"To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!"

Kurt Vonnegut

"Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh since there is less cleaning up to do afterward."

Maya Angelou

"Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends."

Max Eastman

"Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails."

Max Frisch

"When you say a friend has a sense of humor do you mean that he makes you laugh, or that he can make you laugh?"

Jane Austen

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?"

David Herbert Lawrence

"One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality."

Richard Pryor

"There's a thin line between to laugh with and to laugh at."

Anthony Burgess

"Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone."

Eminem

"Anybody with a sense of humor is going to put on my album and laugh from beginning to end."

Bryant H. McGill

"Why do we laugh at such terrible things? Because comedy is often the sarcastic realization of inescapable tragedy."

Jay Leno

"You cannot be mad at somebody who makes you laugh - it's as simple as that."

Mahatma Gandhi

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Voltaire

"God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."

Jerry Seinfeld

"The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, make strangers laugh, get paid to make strangers laugh, and make people talk like you because it's so much fun."