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

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

Proverb, Chinese

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

Diller, Phyllis

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.

Bruce, Lenny

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

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

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

James Thurber

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

Eco, Umberto

10.

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

Herold, Don

11.

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

Johnson, Samuel

12.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

13.

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

Trilling, Lionel

14.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

15.

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.

16.

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

Dick Clark

17.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

18.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

19.

All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.

Charlie Chaplin

20.

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

Mel Brooks

21.

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

Edward De Bono

22.

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

23.

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

Rourke, Constance

24.

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

Albee, Edward

25.

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

Nelson, Lord

26.

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

27.

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

James Thurber

28.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

29.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

30.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

31.

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

32.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

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.

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

Eva Hoffman

35.

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

Procter, J. J.

36.

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

37.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

38.

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

A. Whitney Brown

39.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

40.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

41.

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

Seabury, David

42.

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

43.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

44.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

45.

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

46.

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

Knox, Ronald

47.

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

48.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

49.

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

Horace Walpole

50.

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