Motivational Quotes

Humor

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

- Pico Iyer

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Herold, Don

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

Martin, Steve

Humor is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.

Borge, Victor

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

Bill Nye

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

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

A. Whitney Brown

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

Socrates

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

Nelson, Lord

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

10.

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

11.

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

Bruce, Lenny

12.

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

Gary, Roman

13.

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

14.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

15.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

16.

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

Proverb, Chinese

17.

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

Johnson, Samuel

18.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

22.

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

Trilling, Lionel

23.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

24.

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

25.

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

26.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

27.

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

28.

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

Charlie Chaplin

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

32.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

33.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

34.

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

35.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

36.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

37.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

38.

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

Knox, Ronald

39.

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

Diller, Phyllis

40.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

41.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

42.

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

43.

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

James Thurber

44.

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

Edward De Bono

45.

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

Horace Walpole

46.

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.

Fredrich

47.

Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.

Hughes, Langston

48.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

49.

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

50.

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

James Thurber