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

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

Procter, J. J.

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

Nelson, Lord

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.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

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

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

Wilson, Flip

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

10.

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

Hughes, Langston

11.

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

12.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

13.

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

Horace Walpole

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Martin, Steve

18.

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

Fredrich

19.

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

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.

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

Strachey, Lionel

22.

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

Rourke, Constance

23.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

24.

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

Proverb, Chinese

25.

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

26.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

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.

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

Albee, Edward

29.

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

Herold, Don

30.

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

31.

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

James Thurber

32.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

33.

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

Eco, Umberto

34.

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

James Thurber

35.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

36.

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

37.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

38.

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

Socrates

39.

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

Twain, Mark

40.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

41.

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

Bill Nye

42.

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

Johnson, Samuel

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

46.

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

Dick Clark

47.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

48.

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