Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Hughes, Langston

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

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

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

Knox, Ronald

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

Albee, Edward

David Nicholls

10.

Humor is a rubber sword - it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.

Mary Hirsch

11.

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

Trilling, Lionel

12.

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

Mel Brooks

13.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

14.

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

15.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

16.

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

Williamson, Nicol

17.

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

Jeph Jacques

18.

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

19.

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

Lewis Mumford

20.

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

21.

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

James Thurber

22.

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

23.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

24.

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

25.

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

Herold, Don

26.

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

Eco, Umberto

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.

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

29.

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

Joubert, Joseph

30.

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

31.

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

Conrad, Joseph

32.

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.

33.

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

Nelson, Lord

34.

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

Dick Clark

35.

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

Diller, Phyllis

36.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

37.

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

38.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

39.

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

Wilson, Flip

40.

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

41.

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

Seabury, David

42.

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

43.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

44.

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

45.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

46.

Fortune and humor govern the world.