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

23.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

24.

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

25.

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

Lewis Mumford

26.

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

Eva Hoffman

27.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

28.

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

29.

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

Diller, Phyllis

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

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

Salma Hayek

33.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

34.

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

35.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

36.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

40.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

41.

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

Warhol, Andy

42.

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