Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Knox, Ronald

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Clark, Dick

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

Lewis Mumford

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

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

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

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

Socrates

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

Seabury, David

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.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

10.

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

Martin, Steve

11.

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

Johnson, Samuel

12.

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

Eco, Umberto

13.

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

14.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

15.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

16.

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

Edward De Bono

17.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

18.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

19.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

20.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

21.

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

Salma Hayek

22.

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

Gary, Roman

23.

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

24.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

25.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

26.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

27.

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

28.

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

29.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

30.

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

31.

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

Charlie Chaplin

32.

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

Fredrich

33.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

34.

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

35.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

36.

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

Bill Nye

37.

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

A. Whitney Brown

38.

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

Herold, Don

39.

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

James Thurber

40.

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

Eva Hoffman

41.

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

Jeph Jacques

42.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

43.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

44.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

45.

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

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.

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

Procter, J. J.

48.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

49.

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