Motivational Quotes

Humor

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

- Albee, Edward

Best Quotes about Humor

A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs-jolted by every pebble in the road.

Beecher, Henry Ward

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

A joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hand like a cheap umbrella.

David Nicholls

A person who knows how to laugh at himself will never ceased to be amused.

Maclaine, Shirley

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

Life is tough, and if you have the ability to laugh at it you have the ability to enjoy it.

Salma Hayek

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

10.

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.

Bruce, Lenny

11.

Levity is often less foolish and gravity less wise than each of them appears.

Colton, Charles Caleb

12.

Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.

Muggeridge, Malcolm

13.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.

James Thurber

14.

All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.

Charlie Chaplin

15.

An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.

Irving, Washington

16.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

Twain, Mark

17.

Humor is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.

Borge, Victor

18.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

19.

Humor is, I think, the sublets and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers

Rosten, Leo

20.

Good humor isn't a trait of character, it is an art which requires practice.

Seabury, David

21.

The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

Horace Walpole

22.

Our five senses are incomplete without the sixth -- a sense of humor.

23.

Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.

Trilling, Lionel

24.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

25.

One should never risk a joke, even of the mildest and most unexceptional charters, except among people of culture and wit.

La Bruyere, Jean De

26.

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

Eco, Umberto

27.

If you're at school and you're not that bright or good-looking or popular or whatever, and one day you say something and someone laughs, well, you sort of grab onto it, don't you? you think, well I run funny and I've got this stupid big face and big thighs and no-one fancies me, but at least I can make people laugh. And It's such a nice feeling, making someone laugh, that maybe you get a bit reliant on it. Like, if you're not funny then you're not... anything.

David Nicholls

28.

I am a great friend to public amusements, for they keep the people from vice.

Johnson, Samuel

29.

We never respect those who amuse us, however we may smile at their comic powers.

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

30.

The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.

Socrates

31.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

32.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

33.

It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humor.

Maugham, W. Somerset

34.

Humor is a whisper from the soul, imploring mind and body to relax, let go and be at peace again.

35.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

36.

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

Hemingway, Ernest

37.

Any discussion of the problems of being funny in America will not make sense unless we substitute the word wit for humor. Humor inspires sympathetic good-natured laughter and is favored by the healing-power gang. Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down.

King, Florence

38.

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.

Mel Brooks

39.

The hall-mark of American humor is its pose of illiteracy.

Knox, Ronald

40.

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.

Fredrich

41.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

42.

Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.

Martin, Steve

43.

Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.

Hughes, Langston

44.

Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.

E. B. White

45.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

46.

Any man who has had the job I've had and didn't have a sense of humor wouldn't still be here.

Truman, Harry S

47.

Humor has been a fashioning instrument in America, cleaving its way through the national life, holding tenaciously to the spread elements of that life. Its mode has often been swift and coarse and ruthless, beyond art and beyond established civilization. It has engaged in warfare against the established heritage, against the bonds of pioneer existence. Its objective --the unconscious objective of a disunited people --has seemed to be that of creating fresh bonds, a new unity, the semblance of a society and the rounded completion of an American type.

Rourke, Constance

48.

A humorist is a person who feels bad, but who feels good about it.

Herold, Don

49.

A brilliant epigram is a solemn platitude gone to a masquerade ball.

Strachey, Lionel

50.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people --that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.

Thurber, James