Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Horace

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

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

James Thurber

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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

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

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

Clark, Dick

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

Rourke, Constance

10.

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

Knox, Ronald

11.

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

12.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

13.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

14.

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

15.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

16.

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

17.

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

Diller, Phyllis

18.

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

Gary, Roman

19.

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

Salma Hayek

20.

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.

21.

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

Edward De Bono

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

James Thurber

26.

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

Conrad, Joseph

27.

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

28.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

29.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

30.

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

Proverb, Chinese

31.

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

Martin, Steve

32.

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

33.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

34.

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

Lewis Mumford

35.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

36.

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

Strachey, Lionel

37.

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

38.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

39.

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

Procter, J. J.

40.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

41.

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

Twain, Mark

42.

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

A. Whitney Brown

43.

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

44.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

45.

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

Williamson, Nicol

46.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

47.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.