The Scroll Marked VII I will laugh at the world.

Whatever my fate, I'll go to it laughing.

I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!

Still, I'll be laughing like a clown

I will laugh at the world.

And most of all, I will laugh at myself for man is most comical when he takes himself too seriously.

Never will I fall into this trap of the mind.

And with my laughter all things will be reduced to their proper size. I will laugh at my failures and they will vanish in clouds of new dreams; I will laugh at my successes and they will shrink to their true value...

Never will I allow myself to become so important, so wise, so dignified, so powerful, that I forget how to laugh at myself and my world. In this matter I will always remain as a child, for only as a child am I given the ability to look up to others; and so long as I look up to another I will never grow too long for my cot.

This too shall pass.

Of all the laughs that strictly speaking are not laughs, but modes of ululation, only three I think need detain us, I mean the bitter, the hollow and the mirthless. They correspond to successive… how shall I say successive… suc… successive excoriations of the understanding, and the passage from the one to the other is the passage from the lesser to the greater, from the lower to the higher, from the outer to the inner, from the gross to the fine, from the matter to the form. The laugh that now is mirthless once was hollow, the laugh that once was hollow once was bitter. And the laugh that once was bitter? Eyewater, Mr. Watt, eyewater. But do not let us waste our time with that. . . . The bitter, the hollow and — Haw! Haw! — the mirthless. The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not true! Well well. But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout — Haw! — so. It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs — silence please — at that which is unhappy”.

I cried when I was born and I shall die laughing.

I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.

I shall but love thee bitter after death

I grow old on my bitterness.

I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing..

I hasten to laugh at everything, for fear of being obliged to weep.

Humor is really laughing off a hurt, grinning at misery.

I shall have to wear the special grin I reserve for bearing really disastrous tidings.