Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Clark, Dick

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Martin, Steve

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

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

The best defence against misguided arrogance is a keen sense of humour.

Kathryn L. Nelson

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

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

Hughes, Langston

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

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

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

Warhol, Andy

10.

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

Dick Clark

11.

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.

12.

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

Proverb, Chinese

13.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

14.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

15.

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

Johnson, Samuel

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

19.

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

20.

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

Gary, Roman

21.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

22.

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

Eco, Umberto

23.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

24.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

25.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

26.

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

27.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

28.

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

29.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

30.

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

James Thurber

31.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Bill Nye

35.

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

Fredrich

36.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

37.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

38.

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

Conrad, Joseph

39.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

40.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Diller, Phyllis

44.

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

Socrates

45.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

46.

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