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

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

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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

Socrates

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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

A person who knows how to laugh at himself will never ceased to be amused.

Maclaine, Shirley

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

Mary Hirsch

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

Bill Nye

10.

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

Eva Hoffman

11.

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

12.

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

Hughes, Langston

13.

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

14.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

15.

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

Gary, Roman

16.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

17.

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

18.

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

James Thurber

19.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

20.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

21.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

Joubert, Joseph

25.

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

26.

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

Herold, Don

27.

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

28.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

29.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

30.

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

Trilling, Lionel

31.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

32.

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

Rourke, Constance

33.

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

34.

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

Bruce, Lenny

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Horace

38.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Mel Brooks

43.

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

Eco, Umberto

44.

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

Albee, Edward

45.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

46.

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

47.

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

Salma Hayek

48.

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

49.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

50.

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

Lewis Mumford