Motivational Quotes

Humor

The secret to humor is surprise.

- Aristotle

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Humor -- the perfect relationship of the parts to the whole.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

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

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

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

Strachey, Lionel

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

10.

Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.

Lewis Mumford

11.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

12.

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

Herold, Don

13.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

14.

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

Mel Brooks

15.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

16.

There is always some frivolity in excellent minds; they have wings to rise, but also stray.

Joubert, Joseph

17.

There are things of deadly earnest that can only be mentioned under the cover of a joke.

Procter, J. J.

18.

People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

19.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

20.

Isn't it sad how some people can't be funny, so they have to settle for being obnoxious?

21.

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

Eco, Umberto

22.

That is the saving grace of humor, if you fail no one is laughing at you.

A. Whitney Brown

23.

Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.

Edward De Bono

24.

One never needs their humor as much as when they argue with a fool.

Proverb, Chinese

25.

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

26.

Burt Reynolds once asked me out. I was in his room.

Diller, Phyllis

27.

Humor is a rubber sword - it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.

Mary Hirsch

28.

Be simple in words, manners, and gestures. Amuse as well as instruct. If you can make a man laugh, you can make him think and make him like and believe you.

Smith, Alfred E.

29.

Comedy may be big business but it isn't pretty.

Martin, Steve

30.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

31.

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

Trilling, Lionel

32.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

33.

Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.

Kleiser, Grenville

34.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

35.

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

Conrad, Joseph

36.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

37.

If you can make a woman laugh you can do anything with her.

Williamson, Nicol

38.

I could not tread these perilous paths in safety, if I did not keep a saving sense of humor.

Nelson, Lord

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

42.

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

James Thurber

43.

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