Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Muggeridge, Malcolm

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Warhol, Andy

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

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.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

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

Bruce, Lenny

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

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

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

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

10.

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

Nelson, Lord

11.

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

12.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

13.

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

Proverb, Chinese

14.

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

Mary Hirsch

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Albee, Edward

20.

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

21.

What's the point of havin'a rapier wit if I can't use it to stab people?

Jeph Jacques

22.

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

Joubert, Joseph

23.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

24.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

25.

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

26.

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

Strachey, Lionel

27.

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

Trilling, Lionel

28.

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

29.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

30.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Eco, Umberto

34.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

35.

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

Conrad, Joseph

36.

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

Socrates

37.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

38.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

39.

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

Bill Nye

40.

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

A. Whitney Brown

41.

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

Horace Walpole

42.

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

43.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

44.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

45.

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

Charlie Chaplin

46.

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

Salma Hayek

47.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

48.

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

49.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

50.

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

James Thurber