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

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

Eco, Umberto

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

Clark, Dick

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

Bruce, Lenny

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

Martin, Steve

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

Seabury, David

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

Edward De Bono

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

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

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

10.

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

Mel Brooks

11.

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

12.

Humor is a rubber sword - it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.

Mary Hirsch

13.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

14.

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

15.

Any discussion of the problems of being funny in America will not make sense unless we substitute the word wit for humor. Humor inspires sympathetic good-natured laughter and is favored by the healing-power gang. Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down.

King, Florence

16.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

17.

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

18.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

19.

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

James Thurber

20.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

21.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

22.

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

Salma Hayek

23.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

24.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

25.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

26.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

27.

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

Trilling, Lionel

28.

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

29.

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

Horace

30.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

31.

Humor is everywhere, in that there's irony in just about anything a human does.

Bill Nye

32.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

33.

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

34.

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

Dick Clark

35.

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

Knox, Ronald

36.

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

Eva Hoffman

37.

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

38.

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

Hughes, Langston

39.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

40.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

41.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

42.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

43.

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

44.

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

Warhol, Andy

45.

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

46.

That is the saving grace of humor, if you fail no one is laughing at you.

A. Whitney Brown

47.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

48.

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

Joubert, Joseph

49.

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

50.

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

Diller, Phyllis