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

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

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

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

Dick Clark

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

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

Mel Brooks

A brilliant epigram is a solemn platitude gone to a masquerade ball.

Strachey, Lionel

10.

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

11.

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

Trilling, Lionel

12.

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

13.

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

James Thurber

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.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

16.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

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.

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

Socrates

19.

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

Hughes, Langston

20.

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

Seabury, David

21.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

22.

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

Bill Nye

23.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

24.

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

Wilson, Flip

25.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

26.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

27.

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

Edward De Bono

28.

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

Herold, Don

29.

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

Horace Walpole

30.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

31.

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

Twain, Mark

32.

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

33.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

34.

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

James Thurber

35.

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

36.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

37.

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

Mary Hirsch

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

41.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

42.

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

43.

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

Eva Hoffman

44.

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

Fredrich

45.

All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.

Charlie Chaplin

46.

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