Quote of the Day: Psychologist Gordon Allport on Humor Being the Best Way To Fight Life’s ‘Tangles’—‘We Have No Appropriate Sword Other Than Laughter’

While he might not be a household name, Gordon W. Allport was a significant figure in the field of psychology. As VeryWellMind reported, he is “credited with founding personality psychology and developing trait theory.” Whereas other psychologists emphasized the study of psychoanalysis or human behavior as a whole back then, Allport looked to “individual difference and situational contexts.” 

He met Sigmund Freud once, and their interaction made Allport believe that psychoanalysis dug too deeply into a person’s past and psyche, whereas behaviorism—the dominant field in United States psychology at the time—didn’t go far enough. And this difference in opinion is most likely what allowed him to come up with concepts such as laughter being the best tool to battle tough times, which is ourquote of the day.

Allport was born on Nov. 11, 1897, in Montezuma, IN, and was the youngest of four brothers, with a schoolteacher for a mother and a doctor for a father. He was shy and studious and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and economics from Harvard College (later University), and then returned to earn a PhD in psychology there after traveling to teach in Turkey. 

As Harvard University reported, the psychologist was one of their faculty members from 1930 to 1967, the year he died. Throughout his academic career, he conducted research on personality psychology and was likely the first person to teach a class on the topic in the United States, per VeryWellMind. He came up with a “highly influential three-tiered hierarchy of personality traits,” according to Harvard, which included cardinal, central and secondary traits. Through all of his work, he truly left quite a mark on modern psychology. 

Today’s quote is from one of his last books, published posthumously in 1968. It features Allport’s thoughts on personal therapy and how a little humor can do you some good.

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Quote of the Day by Gordon Allport

“So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter.”

This quote is in Allport’s book, The Person in Psychology: Selected Essays. It appears in Part II, Chapter 7, “Mental Health: A Generic Attitude.”

Specifically, this is in a section about “the role of the religious counselor,” which Allport writes is to help a “man’s total orientation,” or his disposition. He says that the goal of therapy “is to free the individual so that he may know himself…” And that only the individual really knows their own problems and mind, which makes the job of counseling (whether religious or not) difficult.

The paragraph with this quote starts with Allport saying he believes that “the advancement of mental health involves a paradox: the tie that binds serious attitudinal orientation with humor.” Then we have our quote, with a little more context:

“So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter. I venture to say that no person is in good health unless he can laugh at himself quietly and privately, noticing where he has overreached, where his pretensions have been overblown or pedantic.”

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Deeper Meaning of Gordon Allport’s Quote—Laughter Is the Best Weapon

Following that quote, Allport goes on to write that people need to acknowledge where they were “hoodwinked” and admit to times when they were too sure of themselves, “too shortsighted” and “above all too conceited.” And the antidote for vanity is laughter, he writes. 

Of course, he says that you have to then get serious and correct your behavior or face your issues head-on. But the initial good first step is laughter. 

Allport’s words are reassuring and lovely in their simplicity and positivity—things that a lot of these psychologists didn’t have in their work at the time. Even today, with personal therapists or psychologists, it can be hard to find professional advice that reminds us to find the humor in life and laugh through some struggles. 

Sure, we can’t simply laugh through the pain a lot of the time. There are so many other factors or situations—such as mental disorders or illnesses that require medication or trauma that can’t just be ignored or joked away—that require more attention.

However, in the most basic terms, Allport is saying that there are things in life that make us angry, sad, upset or frustrated, and sometimes the only thing we can do—and maybe the best thing for our sanity—is to laugh about it. Or maybe find humor in it or in something else to brighten your mood. 

Just as he says after the quote, it’s important not to just look at the levity of a situation, but it’s also good to laugh at yourself. You don’t want to take yourself so seriously that you can’t recognize when you were wrong, too full of yourself or had too myopic a view on things. 

While laughter isn’t a cure-all, Allport’s quote is a good reminder that we shouldn’t take life too seriously all of the time, and that a little smile and chuckle can go a long way to relieve short-term frustrations. 

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More Quotes from Gordon Allport

• “Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.”
• “Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy.”
• “Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge.”
• “People it seems, are busy leading their lives into the future, whereas psychology, for the most part, is busy tracing them into the past.”
• “To understand what a person is, it is necessary always to refer to what he may be in the future, for every state of the person is pointed in the direction of future possibilities.”
• “Much of our life is spent wishing others understood us better than they do.”

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