Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Knox, Ronald

Best Quotes about Humor

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

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

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

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.

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

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

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

10.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

11.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

12.

The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.

James Thurber

13.

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

Twain, Mark

14.

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

15.

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

Eva Hoffman

16.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

17.

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

Joubert, Joseph

18.

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

Albee, Edward

19.

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

20.

Burt Reynolds once asked me out. I was in his room.

Diller, Phyllis

21.

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

Nelson, Lord

22.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

23.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

24.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

25.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

26.

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

Gary, Roman

27.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

28.

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

29.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

30.

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

Horace Walpole

31.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

32.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

33.

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

Socrates

34.

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

Mel Brooks

35.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

36.

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

Conrad, Joseph

37.

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

38.

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

Herold, Don

39.

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

Johnson, Samuel

40.

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

41.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

42.

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

43.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

44.

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

45.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

46.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

47.

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

Mary Hirsch

48.

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

49.

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

Williamson, Nicol

50.

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