Motivational Quotes

Humor

It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humor.

- Maugham, W. Somerset

Best Quotes about Humor

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

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

Nelson, Lord

It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humor.

Maugham, W. Somerset

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

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

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

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

Mel Brooks

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

Johnson, Samuel

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.

Bruce, Lenny

10.

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

11.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

12.

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

13.

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

Joubert, Joseph

14.

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

15.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

16.

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

Knox, Ronald

17.

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

A. Whitney Brown

18.

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

19.

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

Horace Walpole

20.

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

Salma Hayek

21.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

22.

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

23.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

24.

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

Eva Hoffman

25.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

26.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

27.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

28.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

29.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

30.

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

Warhol, Andy

31.

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

Wilson, Flip

32.

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

Williamson, Nicol

33.

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

Martin, Steve

34.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

35.

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

Edward De Bono

36.

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

Socrates

37.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

38.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

39.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

40.

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

Bruce, Lenny

41.

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

Mary Hirsch

42.

The right honorable gentlemen is indebted to his memory for his jokes and his imagination for his facts.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

43.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

44.

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

Horace

45.

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

Gary, Roman

46.

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

Bill Nye

47.

Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.

E. B. White

48.

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

49.

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

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