Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Kathryn L. Nelson

Best Quotes about Humor

1.

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

Clark, Dick

2.

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

Herold, Don

3.

A joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hand like a cheap umbrella.

David Nicholls

4.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

5.

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

Hughes, Langston

6.

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

7.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

8.

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

Wilson, Flip

9.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

10.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

11.

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

Johnson, Samuel

12.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

13.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

14.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

15.

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

16.

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

James Thurber

17.

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

18.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

19.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

20.

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

James Thurber

21.

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

Diller, Phyllis

22.

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

Socrates

23.

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

Edward De Bono

24.

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

Procter, J. J.

25.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

26.

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

Mel Brooks

27.

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

28.

Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.

Muggeridge, Malcolm

29.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

30.

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

31.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

32.

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

33.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

34.

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

Joubert, Joseph

35.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

36.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

37.

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

38.

I could not tread these perilous paths in safety, if I did not keep a saving sense of humor.

Nelson, Lord

39.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

40.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

41.

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

Rourke, Constance

42.

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

A. Whitney Brown

43.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

44.

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

45.

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

Martin, Steve

46.

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

47.

If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.

Gandhi, Mahatma

48.

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