“In moments the whole assembly was rocking with jeering laughter as I stood ridiculously before them. My hands clenched uncontrollably; I had been prepared for any humiliation but the martyrdom of laughter.”

“The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness, "that delectable trance of happiness, that ultimate peak of delight. Laughter of delight, delight of laughter." There is no doubt: this laughter goes "far beyond joking, jeering, and ridicule." The two sisters stretched out on their bed are not laughing at anything concrete, their laughter has no object; it is an expression of being rejoicing at being... and in this ecstatic laughter he loses all memory, all desire, cries out to the immediate present of the world, and needs no other knowledge.”

“Mosquito [...] had asked Ear to marry him, whereupon Ear fell on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. "How much longer do you think you will live?" she asked. "You are already a skeleton." Mosquito went away humiliated, and any time he passed her way he told Ear that he was still alive.”

“Was he laughing at me? Was I so pathetic that the thought that not only getting caught, but being humiliated with laughter was appropriate punishment for my lameness?”

“The Olympian vice.--In defiance of that philosopher who as true Englishman tried to give any thinking person's laughter a bad reputation ('Laughter is a nasty infirmity of human nature that any thinking person will endeavour to overcome'---Hobbes), I would actually go as far as to rank philosophers according to the level of their laughter---right up to the ones who are capable of golden laughter. And assuming that gods, too, are able to philosophize, as various of my conclusions force me to believe, then I do not doubt when they do so, they know how to laugh in a new and superhuman fashion---and at the expense of everything serious! Gods like to jeer: it seems that even at religious observances they cannot keep from laughing.”

“And at the thought of the punishments Youdi might inflict upon me I was seized by such a mighty fit of laughter that I shook, with mightly silent laughter and my features composed in their wonted sadness and calm. But my whole body shook, and even my legs, so that I had to lean against a tree, or against a bush, when the fit came on me standing, my umbrella being no longer sufficient to keep me from falling. Strange laughter truly, and no doubt misnamed.”