Motivational Quotes

Humor

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

- Seldes, Gilbert

Best Quotes about Humor

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

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

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

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

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

Maclaine, Shirley

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

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

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

Clark, Dick

10.

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

11.

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

Trilling, Lionel

12.

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

Knox, Ronald

13.

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

Gary, Roman

14.

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

Bill Nye

15.

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

Albee, Edward

16.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

17.

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

Twain, Mark

18.

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

Seabury, David

19.

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

Hughes, Langston

20.

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

Mel Brooks

21.

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

Edward De Bono

22.

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

23.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

24.

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

Martin, Steve

25.

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

26.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

27.

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

Bruce, Lenny

28.

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

Johnson, Samuel

29.

I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell?

Warhol, Andy

30.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

31.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

32.

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

Wilson, Flip

33.

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

Lewis Mumford

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Eva Hoffman

37.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

38.

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

Eco, Umberto

39.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

40.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

41.

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

42.

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

A. Whitney Brown

43.

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

44.

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

Herold, Don

45.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

46.

If you can make a woman laugh you can do anything with her.

Williamson, Nicol

47.

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