Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Humor

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

Get well cards have become so humorous that if you don't get sick you're missing half the fun.

Wilson, Flip

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

Lewis Mumford

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

Knox, Ronald

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

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

Procter, J. J.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

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

A. Whitney Brown

10.

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

Strachey, Lionel

11.

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

12.

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

Joubert, Joseph

13.

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

Rourke, Constance

14.

If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.

Gandhi, Mahatma

15.

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

16.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

17.

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

Trilling, Lionel

18.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

19.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

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

24.

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

James Thurber

25.

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

26.

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

Diller, Phyllis

27.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

28.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

29.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

30.

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

31.

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

Herold, Don

32.

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

Albee, Edward

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Conrad, Joseph

37.

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

Horace Walpole

38.

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

Bill Nye

39.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Warhol, Andy

46.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

47.

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.

48.

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

Clark, Dick

49.

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

James Thurber

50.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor