Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

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

Nelson, Lord

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

Eva Hoffman

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

Herold, Don

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

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

Horace

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

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

Procter, J. J.

10.

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

11.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

12.

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

Bruce, Lenny

13.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

14.

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

Socrates

15.

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

Knox, Ronald

16.

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

17.

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

Johnson, Samuel

18.

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

Rourke, Constance

19.

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

Albee, Edward

20.

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

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.

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

Proverb, Chinese

23.

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

Edward De Bono

24.

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

25.

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

Trilling, Lionel

26.

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

Horace Walpole

27.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

28.

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

Dick Clark

29.

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

James Thurber

30.

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

31.

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

32.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Life is tough, and if you have the ability to laugh at it you have the ability to enjoy it.

Salma Hayek

36.

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

37.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

38.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

39.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

40.

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

Diller, Phyllis

41.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

42.

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

43.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

44.

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

Jeph Jacques

45.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

46.

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

Bill Nye

47.

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

Conrad, Joseph

48.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

49.

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

50.

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