Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Herold, Don

Best Quotes about Humor

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

James Thurber

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

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

Rourke, Constance

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

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Clark, Dick

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

Jeph Jacques

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

10.

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

11.

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

Herold, Don

12.

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

Martin, Steve

13.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

14.

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

A. Whitney Brown

15.

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

16.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

17.

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

18.

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

Charlie Chaplin

19.

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

Lewis Mumford

20.

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

21.

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

Nelson, Lord

22.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

23.

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

Johnson, Samuel

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Trilling, Lionel

28.

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

Procter, J. J.

29.

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

30.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

31.

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

Twain, Mark

32.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

33.

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

Diller, Phyllis

34.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

35.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

36.

Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.

Gary, Roman

37.

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

James Thurber

38.

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

Socrates

39.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

44.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

45.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

46.

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

47.

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

Dick Clark

48.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

49.

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

Eco, Umberto

50.

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