Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Martin, Steve

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

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

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

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

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

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

10.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

11.

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

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Socrates

16.

One never needs their humor as much as when they argue with a fool.

Proverb, Chinese

17.

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

18.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

19.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

20.

Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.

Martin, Steve

21.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

22.

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

Clark, Dick

23.

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

James Thurber

24.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

25.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

26.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

27.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

28.

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

Johnson, Samuel

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

One should never risk a joke, even of the mildest and most unexceptional charters, except among people of culture and wit.

La Bruyere, Jean De

33.

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

Rourke, Constance

34.

Isn't it sad how some people can't be funny, so they have to settle for being obnoxious?

35.

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

Charlie Chaplin

36.

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

Knox, Ronald

37.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

38.

Humor -- the perfect relationship of the parts to the whole.

39.

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

40.

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

Mary Hirsch

41.

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

A. Whitney Brown

42.

King, Florence

43.

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

Warhol, Andy

44.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

45.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

46.

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

Mel Brooks

47.

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

48.

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

Nelson, Lord

49.

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

50.

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