Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Gandhi, Mahatma

Best Quotes about Humor

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

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

Bruce, Lenny

All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.

Charlie Chaplin

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

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

James Thurber

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

Procter, J. J.

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

Eva Hoffman

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Jeph Jacques

14.

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

Joubert, Joseph

15.

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

Martin, Steve

16.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

17.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

18.

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

Herold, Don

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.

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

Johnson, Samuel

21.

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

22.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

23.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

24.

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

Knox, Ronald

25.

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

Dick Clark

26.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

27.

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

Lewis Mumford

28.

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

29.

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

James Thurber

30.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

31.

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

32.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

33.

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

34.

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

Twain, Mark

35.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

36.

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

Eco, Umberto

37.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

38.

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

39.

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

40.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

41.

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

42.

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

Horace

43.

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

44.

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

Horace Walpole

45.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

46.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

47.

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

Williamson, Nicol

48.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

49.

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

Trilling, Lionel

50.

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