Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Knox, Ronald

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Knox, Ronald

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

Dick Clark

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

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

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

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

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

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

10.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

11.

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

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.

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

14.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

15.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

16.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

17.

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

18.

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

Edward De Bono

19.

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

Bill Nye

20.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

21.

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

Nelson, Lord

22.

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

Twain, Mark

23.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

24.

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

Martin, Steve

25.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

26.

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

James Thurber

27.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

28.

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

29.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

30.

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

Horace

31.

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

Clark, Dick

32.

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

Bruce, Lenny

33.

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

Williamson, Nicol

34.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

35.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

36.

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

Fredrich

37.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

38.

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

Mel Brooks

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.

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

41.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

42.

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

Martin, Steve

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Jeph Jacques

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.

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

Strachey, Lionel