Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Joubert, Joseph

Best Quotes about Humor

People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell?

Warhol, Andy

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

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

Dick Clark

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

Eva Hoffman

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

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

Seabury, David

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

10.

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

Twain, Mark

11.

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

Wilson, Flip

12.

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

Albee, Edward

13.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

14.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

15.

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.

16.

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

Gary, Roman

17.

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

18.

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

Martin, Steve

19.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

20.

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

Clark, Dick

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Lewis Mumford

24.

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

James Thurber

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

29.

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

Trilling, Lionel

30.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

31.

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

32.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

33.

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

34.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

35.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

36.

Any man who has had the job I've had and didn't have a sense of humor wouldn't still be here.

Truman, Harry S

37.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

38.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

39.

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

Johnson, Samuel

40.

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

Diller, Phyllis

41.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

42.

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

43.

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

Herold, Don

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Bruce, Lenny

47.

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

Procter, J. J.

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Hughes, Langston