“Why wait for reasons to laugh? Life as it is should be reason enough to laugh. It is so absurd, it is so ridiculous. It is so beautiful, so wonderful! It is all sorts of things together. It is a great cosmic joke.”
“Laughter is the easiest thing in the world if you allow it, but it has become hard. People laugh very raarely, and even when they laugh it is not true. People laugh as if they are obliging somebody, as if they are fulfilling a certain duty. Laughter is fun. You are not obliging anybody!
You should not laugh to make somebody else happy, because if you are not happy of your own accord, you cannot make anybody else happy. You should simply laugh of your own accord, without waiting for reasons to laugh. If you start looking into things, you will not be able to stop laughing. Everything is simply perfect for laughter – nothing is lacking – but we won’t allow it. We are very miserly … miserly about laughter, about love, about life. Once you know that miserliness can be dropped, you move into a different dimension. Laughter is the real religion. Everything else is just metaphysics.”
Everyday Osho — 365 Daily meditations for the here and now by Osho
“Now” he thought, “that all these transitory things have slipped away from me again, I stand once more beneath the sun, as I once stood as a small child. Nothing is mine, I know nothing, I possess nothing, I have learned nothing….” He had to smile again. Yes, his destiny was strange! He was going backwards, and now he stood empty and naked and ignorant in the world. But he did not grieve about it; no, he even felt a great desire to laugh, to laugh at himself, to laugh at this strange, foolish world. — Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
“In my own life, I felt just as Siddhartha did –- amazed at all I had lost, and at the same time just as amazed that I no longer valued what I had lost: my old self, the old world, the old friends… When two people who have experienced this aspect of tapas discuss it, it is invariably an occasion for much laughter — the laughter of relief at no longer needing to be our false self, and the laughter of joy at such good fortune .”— Rolf Gates, Meditations from the Mat
“At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.” — Jean Houston
“So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter. ” — Gordon W. Allport
“A sense of humor… is needed armor. Joy in one’s heart and some laughter on one’s lips is a sign that the person down deep has a pretty good grasp of life.” — Hugh Sidey
“I have always felt that laughter in the face of reality is probably the finest sound there is and will last until the day when the game is called on account of darkness. In this world, a good time to laugh is any time you can.” — Linda Ellerbee
“Laughter is day, and sobriety is night; a smile is the twilight that hovers gently between both, more bewitching than either.” — Henry Ward Beecher
One Response
For all my philosophizing, I’m a funny guy. I generally leave people laughing wherever I go. I even crack up my mental health therapist!