Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Muggeridge, Malcolm

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

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

Bill Nye

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

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

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

10.

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

James Thurber

11.

Burt Reynolds once asked me out. I was in his room.

Diller, Phyllis

12.

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

13.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

14.

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

Clark, Dick

15.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

16.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

17.

Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.

Martin, Steve

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

21.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

22.

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

23.

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

Bruce, Lenny

24.

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

Martin, Steve

25.

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

Socrates

26.

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

Mel Brooks

27.

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

Gary, Roman

28.

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

Twain, Mark

29.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

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.

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.

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

Procter, J. J.

33.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

34.

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

Albee, Edward

35.

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