Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Maclaine, Shirley

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.

Fredrich

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

Edward De Bono

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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

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

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

10.

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

Salma Hayek

11.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

12.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

James Thurber

17.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

18.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

19.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

20.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

21.

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

22.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

23.

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

Eco, Umberto

24.

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

Conrad, Joseph

25.

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

26.

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

Hughes, Langston

27.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

28.

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

Gary, Roman

29.

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

Mel Brooks

30.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

31.

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

Albee, Edward

32.

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

Clark, Dick

33.

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

Rourke, Constance

34.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

35.

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

Horace

36.

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

Procter, J. J.

37.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

38.

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

Martin, Steve

39.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

40.

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

Wilson, Flip

41.

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

James Thurber

42.

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

Herold, Don

43.

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

44.

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

Horace Walpole

45.

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

Knox, Ronald

46.

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

47.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

48.

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

Lewis Mumford

49.

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

Trilling, Lionel

50.

The happiness or unhappiness of men depends as much on their humors as on fortune.