Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

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

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

Williamson, Nicol

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.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

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

Horace

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

10.

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

Procter, J. J.

11.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

12.

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

Mel Brooks

13.

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

Clark, Dick

14.

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

Socrates

15.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

16.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

17.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

18.

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

Lewis Mumford

19.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

20.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

21.

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

A. Whitney Brown

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

James Thurber

25.

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

Mary Hirsch

26.

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

Johnson, Samuel

27.

A brilliant epigram is a solemn platitude gone to a masquerade ball.

Strachey, Lionel

28.

Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.

Martin, Steve

29.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

30.

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

Albee, Edward

31.

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

Trilling, Lionel

32.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

33.

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

34.

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

35.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

36.

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

Joubert, Joseph

37.

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

38.

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

Conrad, Joseph

39.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

40.

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

Fredrich

41.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

42.

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

Martin, Steve

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

46.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

47.

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

48.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

49.

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

Seabury, David

50.

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

Rourke, Constance