Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Johnson, Samuel

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Albee, Edward

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

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 the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

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

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

Socrates

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

Martin, Steve

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

Diller, Phyllis

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

10.

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

Mel Brooks

11.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

12.

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

Conrad, Joseph

13.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

14.

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

Rourke, Constance

15.

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

Procter, J. J.

16.

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

Eco, Umberto

17.

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

18.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Martin, Steve

23.

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

24.

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

James Thurber

25.

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

Horace

26.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

27.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

28.

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

Trilling, Lionel

29.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

30.

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

Dick Clark

31.

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

Williamson, Nicol

32.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

33.

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

34.

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

Johnson, Samuel

35.

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

Proverb, Chinese

36.

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

37.

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

Twain, Mark

38.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

39.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

41.

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

42.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

43.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

44.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

45.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

46.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

47.

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

Joubert, Joseph

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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