Motivational Quotes

Humor

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

- Pico Iyer

Best Quotes about Humor

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

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

Charlie Chaplin

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

Hughes, Langston

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

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

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

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

Knox, Ronald

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

Martin, Steve

10.

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

A. Whitney Brown

11.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

12.

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

13.

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

Dick Clark

14.

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

15.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Mel Brooks

19.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

20.

There's nothing like a gleam of humor to reassure you that a fellow human being is ticking inside a strange face.

Eva Hoffman

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

24.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

25.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

26.

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

Johnson, Samuel

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

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

31.

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

Fredrich

32.

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

Martin, Steve

33.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

34.

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

Edward De Bono

35.

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

Salma Hayek

36.

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

Albee, Edward

37.

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

38.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

42.

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

Twain, Mark

43.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

44.

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