Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

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

A. Whitney Brown

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

Horace

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

Knox, Ronald

What's the point of havin'a rapier wit if I can't use it to stab people?

Jeph Jacques

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

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

Hughes, Langston

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

Procter, J. J.

10.

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

Fredrich

11.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

12.

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

13.

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

14.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

15.

Our five senses are incomplete without the sixth -- a sense of humor.

16.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

17.

Keillor, Garrison

18.

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

Seabury, David

19.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

20.

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

21.

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

Twain, Mark

22.

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

Edward De Bono

23.

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

24.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

25.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

26.

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

Socrates

27.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

28.

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

Williamson, Nicol

29.

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

Wilson, Flip

30.

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

Mary Hirsch

31.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

32.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

33.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

34.

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

35.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

36.

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

Trilling, Lionel

37.

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

Diller, Phyllis

38.

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

39.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

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

41.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

42.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

43.

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

44.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

45.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

46.

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

James Thurber

47.

A rich man's joke is always funny.