Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

Best Quotes about Humor

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

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

Knox, Ronald

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

Rourke, Constance

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

Herold, Don

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

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

Proverb, Chinese

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

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

Fredrich

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

Albee, Edward

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

14.

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

Salma Hayek

15.

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

Martin, Steve

16.

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

17.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

18.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Clark, Dick

22.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

23.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

24.

A jest often decides matters of importance more effectual and happily than seriousness.

Horace

25.

Humor, a good sense of it, is to Americans what manhood is to Spaniards and we will go to great lengths to prove it. Experiments with laboratory rats have shown that, if one psychologist in the room laughs at something a rat does, all of the other psychologists in the room will laugh equally. Nobody wants to be left holding the joke.

Keillor, Garrison

26.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

27.

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

28.

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

Lewis Mumford

29.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

30.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

31.

There's nothing like a gleam of humor to reassure you that a fellow human being is ticking inside a strange face.

Eva Hoffman

32.

What's the point of havin'a rapier wit if I can't use it to stab people?

Jeph Jacques

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.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

35.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

36.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

37.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

38.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

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.

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

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.

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

Mary Hirsch

43.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

44.

Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.

Gary, Roman

45.

The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.

James Thurber

46.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

47.

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

Socrates

48.

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

49.

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

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