Motivational Quotes

Humor

The secret to humor is surprise.

- Aristotle

Best Quotes about Humor

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

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

Conrad, Joseph

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

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

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

Knox, Ronald

Where ever you find humor, you find pathos close by it side.

Whipple, Edwin P.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

Humor is everywhere, in that there's irony in just about anything a human does.

Bill Nye

10.

Never say a humorous thing to a man who does not possess humor. He will always use it in evidence against you.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

11.

Humor is always based on a modicum of truth. Have you ever heard a joke about a father-in-law?

Dick Clark

12.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

13.

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

Seabury, David

14.

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

Hughes, Langston

15.

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

Williamson, Nicol

16.

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

17.

An emotional man may possess no humor, but a humorous man usually has deep pockets of emotion, sometimes tucked away or forgotten.

Rourke, Constance

18.

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

Procter, J. J.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Johnson, Samuel

22.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

23.

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

24.

The happiness or unhappiness of men depends as much on their humors as on fortune.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

25.

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

Carlyle, Thomas

26.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

27.

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

Mary Hirsch

28.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

29.

Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humor?

Colby, Frank Moore

30.

A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Wit is a weapon. Jokes are a masculine way of inflicting superiority. But humor is the pursuit of a gentle grin, usually in solitude.

Muir, Frank

34.

There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

36.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

38.

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

Lewis Mumford

39.

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

40.

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

Edward De Bono

41.

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place.

Mark Twain

42.

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

43.

The right honorable gentlemen is indebted to his memory for his jokes and his imagination for his facts.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

44.

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

45.

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

Herold, Don

46.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.