Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Colton, Charles Caleb

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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

Trilling, Lionel

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

Seabury, David

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

Our five senses are incomplete without the sixth -- a sense of humor.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

If you're at school and you're not that bright or good-looking or popular or whatever, and one day you say something and someone laughs, well, you sort of grab onto it, don't you? you think, well I run funny and I've got this stupid big face and big thighs and no-one fancies me, but at least I can make people laugh. And It's such a nice feeling, making someone laugh, that maybe you get a bit reliant on it. Like, if you're not funny then you're not... anything.

David Nicholls

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

10.

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

Warhol, Andy

11.

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

Socrates

12.

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

13.

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

Eco, Umberto

14.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

15.

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

16.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

17.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

18.

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

Conrad, Joseph

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Twain, Mark

22.

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

Nelson, Lord

23.

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

24.

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

Dick Clark

25.

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

Bill Nye

26.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

27.

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

28.

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

James Thurber

29.

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

Proverb, Chinese

30.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

31.

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

Horace Walpole

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

36.

If you can make a woman laugh you can do anything with her.

Williamson, Nicol

37.

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

Bruce, Lenny

38.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

39.

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

Edward De Bono

40.

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

Mel Brooks

41.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

42.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

46.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

47.

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

48.

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

49.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

50.

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

Hughes, Langston