Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

1.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

2.

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

Clark, Dick

3.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

4.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

5.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

6.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

7.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

8.

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

Mel Brooks

9.

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

Joubert, Joseph

10.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

11.

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

Warhol, Andy

12.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

13.

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

Trilling, Lionel

14.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

15.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

16.

We never respect those who amuse us, however we may smile at their comic powers.

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

17.

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

Horace

18.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

19.

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

Charlie Chaplin

20.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

21.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

22.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

23.

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

Twain, Mark

24.

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

25.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

26.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

27.

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

Martin, Steve

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Albee, Edward

31.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

32.

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

James Thurber

33.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

34.

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

35.

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

Strachey, Lionel

36.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

37.

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

Proverb, Chinese

38.

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

Herold, Don

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

44.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

45.

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

Wilson, Flip

46.

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

Nelson, Lord

47.

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

Bruce, Lenny

48.

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

49.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

50.

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