Motivational Quotes

Humor

Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.

- Hughes, Langston

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Gary, Roman

Where ever you find humor, you find pathos close by it side.

Whipple, Edwin P.

Never say a humorous thing to a man who does not possess humor. He will always use it in evidence against you.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

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

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

Lewis Mumford

Life is tough, and if you have the ability to laugh at it you have the ability to enjoy it.

Salma Hayek

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

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

Horace

10.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

11.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

12.

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

Joubert, Joseph

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 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

15.

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

Knox, Ronald

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

20.

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

21.

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

Twain, Mark

22.

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

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

24.

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

Albee, Edward

25.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

26.

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

27.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

28.

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

29.

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

Procter, J. J.

30.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

31.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

32.

Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.

Kleiser, Grenville

33.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

34.

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

Williamson, Nicol

35.

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

Socrates

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

39.

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

James Thurber

40.

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

James Thurber

41.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.