Motivational Quotes

Humor

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

- Robert Benchley

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

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

James Thurber

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

Socrates

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place.

Mark Twain

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

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

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

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

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

10.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

11.

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

Dick Clark

12.

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

13.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

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.

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

Salma Hayek

16.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

17.

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

18.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

19.

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

20.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

21.

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

Lewis Mumford

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

26.

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

Johnson, Samuel

27.

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

28.

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

Diller, Phyllis

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Albee, Edward

32.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

33.

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

Clark, Dick

34.

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

Proverb, Chinese

35.

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

Horace Walpole

36.

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

Wilson, Flip

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

40.

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

Horace

41.

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

James Thurber

42.

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