Motivational Quotes

Humor

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

- Peter Ustinov

Best Quotes about Humor

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

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

James Thurber

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

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

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.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

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

Trilling, Lionel

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

10.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

11.

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

Procter, J. J.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Twain, Mark

16.

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

Salma Hayek

17.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

18.

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

Conrad, Joseph

19.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

20.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

21.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

22.

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

Strachey, Lionel

23.

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

Herold, Don

24.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

25.

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

Albee, Edward

26.

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

Mary Hirsch

27.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

31.

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

Rourke, Constance

32.

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

Williamson, Nicol

33.

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

Socrates

34.

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

Diller, Phyllis

35.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

36.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

37.

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

Mel Brooks

38.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

39.

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

Eco, Umberto

40.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

41.

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

42.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

43.

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

Joubert, Joseph

44.

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

45.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

46.

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

47.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

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.

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

Wilson, Flip

50.

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

Charlie Chaplin