25 Quotes on Humour

Humour really is our saving grace, and it helps keep us psychologically healthy...

"Laugh as much as possible, always laugh. It's the sweetest thing one can do for oneself & one's fellow human beings." - Maya Angelou

"A good laugh makes any interview, or any conversation, so much better." - Barbara Walters

"He who laughs, lasts." - Mary Pettibone Poole

"A good laugh overcomes more difficulties and dissipates more dark clouds than any other one thing." - Laura Ingalls Wilder

"There is nothing like a gleam of humour to re-assure you that a fellow human being is ticking inside a strange face." - Eva Hoffman

"Through humour, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it." - Bill Cosby

"A person without a sense of humour is like a wagon without springs. It's jolted by every pebble on the road." - Henry Ward Beecher

"It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously." - Oscar Wilde

"When humour goes, there goes civilisation." - Erma Bombeck

"A sense of humour... is needed armour. 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

"A sense of humour is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done" - Dwight D. Eisenhower

"I think the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humour in it." - Frank A. Clark

"No mind is thoroughly well organised that is deficient in a sense of humour." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Comedy is acting out optimism." - Robin Williams

"A well-developed sense of humour is the pole that adds balance to your steps as you walk the tightrope of life." - William Arthur Ward

"Humour can alter any situation and help us cope at the very instant we are laughing." - Allen Klein

"Humour is just another defense against the universe." - Mel Brooks

"Humour is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it." - Langston Hughes

"Humour is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs." - Christopher Morley

"If you could choose one characteristic that would get you through life, choose a sense of humour." - Jennifer Jones

"Humour is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humour than in anything else. Because, you see, humour is truth." - Victor Borge

"Humour is the affectionate communication of insight." - Leo Rosten

"Like a welcome summer rain, humour may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you." - Langston Hughes

"Next to power without honour, the most dangerous thing in the world is power without humour." - Eric Sevareid

"The more I live, the more I think that humour is the saving sense." - Jacob August Riis

5 Famous Philosophers' Greatest Hypocrisies

Modern philosophy is less interested in the lives great thinkers led than in the texts they produced. But once upon a time, writes James Miller, "philosophers were figures of wonder." These august men were "a source of shared inspiration, offering, through words and deeds, models of wisdom, patterns of conduct, and, for those who took them seriously, examples to be emulated."

Or, sometimes, examples to be avoided.

In his new book, Examined Lives, Miller offers biographical sketches of 12 great philosophers, each of whom "struggled to life his life according to a deliberately chosen set of precepts and beliefs"—occasionally very unsuccessfully.

Brow Beat asked Miller, a professor of politics and director of liberal studies at the New School for Social Research, to offer five examples of times when famous philosophers utterly failed to put their theories into practice. Here's his list:

1. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) taught in his Politics that "man is by nature an animal intended to live in a polis," an independent city-state that was small enough for citizens to know each other personally. However, he tutored Alexander the Great and was notorious in the Greek world for his unblinking support of the Macedonian Empire. After the death of Alexander in 323 B.C., Greeks enraged by Aristotle's conduct tore down a plaque honoring him at Delphi and threw it into a well. (In the 20^th century, archeologists found fragments of the plaque.) Forced to flee for his safety from Athens, Aristotle died a year later in a city garrisoned by Macedonian troops.

2. In his essays, Seneca (4 B.C.-A.D. 65) praised a life of moderation devoted to the pursuit of wisdom, but as one of the Nero's highest-ranking associates he was a master of propaganda. For example, shortly after the emperor had poisoned a rival, Seneca drafted a speech, "On Mercy," praising the good ruler for "innocence of wrong"—a fawning admonition. Four years later, he helped the emperor figure out how to finish up a botched murder of Agrippina, Nero's mother. When he admits such contradictions in his writing, Seneca is disarming: "I am not wise," he demurs, "Require me not to be equal to the best, but better than the worst." Nero eventually ordered Seneca to commit suicide—which he did by slicing open his veins in a tub of steaming hot water.

3. Although Augustine (354-430) once declared that "there is more than one road to wisdom," he helped the early Roman Catholic Church turn persecution into an intellectual art form, as ruthlessly effective in theory as it could sometimes be in practice. As a bishop of his church in Northern Africa, he ordered the destruction of pagan temples and impassively watched while his denunciations provoked a rash of religious suicides, saying that God had allowed the heretics to "perish in their own flames" by "a hidden, though just, disposition."

4. In his writings, René Descartes (1596-1650) claimed that he could secure an indubitable foundation for his philosophy by relying on the principles of pure mathematics. In reality, the inspiration for his scientific outlook was a series of dreams that he regarded, dubiously enough, as a revelation conveyed by a divine messenger. Years later, he attempted to prove in his Meditations that he had not fallen prey to "some malicious demon of the utmost cunning and power," because "it is impossible that God should ever deceive me"—one of the least persuasive arguments in the history of philosophy.

5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) devoted an entire treatise, Emile, to showing how to raise a perfectly virtuous child—yet he abandoned all of his own children with his long-term mistress to a foundlings' home. He pleaded that poverty and poor health made him unfit to be a proper parent, while protesting that no one loved children more than he did. But at the end of his life, he had to concede that living an examined life had proved far harder than he had initially thought-and that "to dare to profess great virtues" without the courage needed to practice them "is to be arrogant and rash."

5 Famous Philosophers' Greatest Hypocrisies

Quotes by Mahatma Gandhi

"Increase of material comforts, it may be generally laid down, does not in any way whatsoever conduce to moral growth."

"I first learned the concepts of non-violence in my marriage."

"Where there is love there is life."

"Whenever you are confronted with an opponent. Conquer him with love."

"My life is an indivisible whole, and all my attitudes run into one another; and they all have their rise in my insatiable love for mankind."

"A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave."

"Anger and intolerance are the twin enemies of correct understanding."

"There is more to life than simply increasing its speed."

"I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people."

"An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so."

"A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act."

"I have also seen children successfully surmounting the effects of an evil inheritance. That is due to purity being an inherent attribute of the soul."

"Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame."

"Purity of mind and idleness are incompatible."

"If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide."

"As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world -- that is the myth of the atomic age -- as in being able to remake ourselves."

"You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty."

"To believe what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man."

"Hatred can be overcome only by love."

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."

"Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good."

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