Motivational Quotes

Humor

A rich man's joke is always funny.

- Brown, Thomas Edward

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Procter, J. J.

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

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

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

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

Clark, Dick

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

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

Twain, Mark

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

10.

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

Conrad, Joseph

11.

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

12.

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

Socrates

13.

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

14.

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

A. Whitney Brown

15.

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

Jeph Jacques

16.

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

Johnson, Samuel

17.

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

Strachey, Lionel

18.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

19.

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

20.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

21.

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

Hughes, Langston

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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

Horace

25.

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

Seabury, David

26.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

27.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

28.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

32.

I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell?

Warhol, Andy

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Albee, Edward

36.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

37.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

38.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

39.

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

Gary, Roman

40.

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

Trilling, Lionel

41.

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

Edward De Bono

42.

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

Herold, Don

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Joubert, Joseph

46.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

47.

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

48.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.