Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Knox, Ronald

Best Quotes about Humor

1.

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

Martin, Steve

2.

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

James Thurber

3.

The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

Horace Walpole

4.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

5.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

6.

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

7.

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

Horace

8.

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

9.

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

Strachey, Lionel

10.

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

Nelson, Lord

11.

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

Wilson, Flip

12.

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

13.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

14.

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

Trilling, Lionel

15.

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

16.

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

Twain, Mark

17.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

18.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

19.

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.

20.

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

Knox, Ronald

21.

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

Seabury, David

22.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

23.

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

Dick Clark

24.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

25.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

26.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

27.

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

28.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

29.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

30.

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

Eco, Umberto

31.

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

Williamson, Nicol

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.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

34.

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

Fredrich

35.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

39.

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

Herold, Don

40.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

41.

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

42.

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

Procter, J. J.

43.

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

Bill Nye

44.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

45.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Eva Hoffman

50.

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

Lewis Mumford