Motivational Quotes

Humor

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

- Mel Brooks

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Mary Hirsch

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

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

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

Mel Brooks

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

10.

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

11.

A brilliant epigram is a solemn platitude gone to a masquerade ball.

Strachey, Lionel

12.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

13.

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

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.

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

Conrad, Joseph

16.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

17.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

18.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

19.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

20.

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

Eva Hoffman

21.

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

22.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

23.

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

A. Whitney Brown

24.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

25.

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

26.

Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.

Kleiser, Grenville

27.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

28.

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

Johnson, Samuel

29.

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

Procter, J. J.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

34.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

35.

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

Herold, Don

36.

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

Clark, Dick

37.

A person who knows how to laugh at himself will never ceased to be amused.

Maclaine, Shirley

38.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

39.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Eco, Umberto

43.

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

Twain, Mark

44.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

49.

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

50.

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

James Thurber