Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.

Hughes, Langston

Never say a humorous thing to a man who does not possess humor. He will always use it in evidence against you.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

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

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

Bruce, Lenny

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

Seabury, David

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

10.

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

Bill Nye

11.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

12.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

13.

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

Johnson, Samuel

14.

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

Herold, Don

15.

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

James Thurber

16.

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

17.

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

Warhol, Andy

18.

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

Salma Hayek

19.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

20.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

21.

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

Edward De Bono

22.

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

Nelson, Lord

23.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

24.

A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

25.

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

Wilson, Flip

26.

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

27.

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place.

Mark Twain

28.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

29.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

30.

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

31.

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

Conrad, Joseph

32.

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

Mary Hirsch

33.

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

Twain, Mark

34.

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

Socrates

35.

An emotional man may possess no humor, but a humorous man usually has deep pockets of emotion, sometimes tucked away or forgotten.

Rourke, Constance

36.

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

37.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

38.

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

Charlie Chaplin

39.

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

40.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

41.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

42.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

43.

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

Eco, Umberto

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Lewis Mumford

49.

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

A. Whitney Brown

50.

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