Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Trilling, Lionel

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

Dick Clark

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

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

Eco, Umberto

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

Conrad, Joseph

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

Edward De Bono

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

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

10.

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

Mary Hirsch

11.

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

Lewis Mumford

12.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

13.

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

Martin, Steve

14.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

15.

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

Wilson, Flip

16.

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

Salma Hayek

17.

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

18.

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

19.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

20.

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

Rourke, Constance

21.

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

Martin, Steve

22.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

26.

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

Gary, Roman

27.

Good humor isn't a trait of character, it is an art which requires practice.

Seabury, David

28.

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

29.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

30.

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

31.

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

Mel Brooks

32.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

33.

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

Nelson, Lord

34.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

35.

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

Clark, Dick

36.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

37.

A joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hand like a cheap umbrella.

David Nicholls

38.

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

Johnson, Samuel

39.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

40.

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

41.

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

Fredrich

42.

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

43.

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

James Thurber

44.

The happiness or unhappiness of men depends as much on their humors as on fortune.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

45.

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

46.

A person who knows how to laugh at himself will never ceased to be amused.

Maclaine, Shirley

47.

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

48.

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

James Thurber

49.

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

50.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov