Viktor E. Frankl Quotes

I'm someone who lived in a war for five years. I received bombs on my head every day of my childhood. Did that stop me from living? Did that stop me from laughing?

You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.

If I can make myself laugh about something that I should be crying about, that's pretty good.

Feeling different, feeling alienated, feeling persecuted, feeling that the only way to deal with the world is to laugh - because if you don't laugh you're going to cry and never stop crying - that's probably what's responsible for the Jews having developed such a great sense of humor. The people who had the greatest reason to weep, learned more than anyone else how to laugh.

If you laugh at it, you can deal with it.

You have to laugh at yourself, because you'd cry your eyes out if you didn't.

We've got to laugh or break our hearts in this damnable world.

We can only feel sorry for ourselves when our misfortunes are still supportable. Once this limit is crossed, the only way to bear the unbearable is to laugh at it.

They say that if you get bored enough with calamity you can learn to laugh.

If you can't do anything about it, laugh like hell.

It's when you cry just a little, but you laugh in the middle that you've made it.

To me, sadness and humor aren't disrelated and humor is the best tool I've had against the sadness in my life.

I've never stabbed, hurt, killed, stolen, anything, but I went to jail for a year. What is that? My pastor said to me the fact that I'm not living under a bridge as a crazy woman, talking to myself, is amazing.

When I was growing up, I was obviously gay, and I got heckled every day of my life. The only way I knew how to survive was to make people laugh. If I could make them laugh, I wouldn't get hung in a locker for two hours. That's a blessing.

I can't understand people who give up and commit suicide. If I have a bad day, I figure tomorrow will be better. And even if it isn't, at least it isn't any worse.

I think if you laugh at your troubles and tell the whole world what went wrong, you can't be frightened by anything.

When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.

Without comedy as a defense mechanism I wouldn't be able to survive.

When I feel confused or depressed, I remember back to junior high and I silently repeat, 'This, too, shall pass.'

Laughter, and the broader category of humor, are key elements in helping us go on with our life after a loss.

When people are in the midst of really heavy stuff and still have a sense of humor, I admire that.

If I'm going to be a pessimist, then I should just stop writing for young people because that's too heavy a burden to put on young readers. But also, I get to meet with people who have waded through horrible things, and they get up every morning, and they try to do their best.

And I definitely gravitate toward people who use laughter to pull themselves out of the abyss.

Hope for the best, survive the worst, find humor wherever you can.

Without a sense of humor, I would have been gone a long time ago.