Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Horace Walpole

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Joubert, Joseph

Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.

Edward De Bono

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

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

Knox, Ronald

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

Eva Hoffman

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

Trilling, Lionel

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

Albee, Edward

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

10.

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

Rourke, Constance

11.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

12.

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

Strachey, Lionel

13.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

14.

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

15.

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

Diller, Phyllis

16.

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

James Thurber

17.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

Bruce, Lenny

22.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

23.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

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.

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

Procter, J. J.

26.

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

Johnson, Samuel

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Seabury, David

30.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

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.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

33.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

34.

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

35.

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

Dick Clark

36.

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

37.

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

Socrates

38.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

39.

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

Martin, Steve

40.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

41.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

42.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

43.

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

44.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

45.

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

Martin, Steve

46.

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

47.

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