Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Lewis Mumford

Best Quotes about Humor

1.

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

2.

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

Dick Clark

3.

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

Procter, J. J.

4.

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

Gary, Roman

5.

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

Trilling, Lionel

6.

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

7.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

8.

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

9.

One never needs their humor as much as when they argue with a fool.

Proverb, Chinese

10.

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

11.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

12.

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

Martin, Steve

13.

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

Eco, Umberto

14.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

15.

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

Williamson, Nicol

16.

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

17.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

18.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

19.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

20.

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

21.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

22.

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

James Thurber

23.

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

24.

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

Wilson, Flip

25.

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

Horace Walpole

26.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

27.

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

Rourke, Constance

28.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

29.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

30.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

31.

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

Albee, Edward

32.

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

Eva Hoffman

33.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

34.

There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

40.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

41.

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

42.

Wit is a weapon. Jokes are a masculine way of inflicting superiority. But humor is the pursuit of a gentle grin, usually in solitude.

Muir, Frank

43.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

44.

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

45.

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

Bill Nye

46.

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

47.

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

Hughes, Langston

48.

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

Mel Brooks

49.

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

50.

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

A. Whitney Brown