Motivational Quotes

Humor

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

- Seldes, Gilbert

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Albee, Edward

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

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

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

Twain, Mark

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

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

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

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

Hughes, Langston

10.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

11.

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

Socrates

12.

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

Horace

13.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

14.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

15.

Our five senses are incomplete without the sixth -- a sense of humor.

16.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

17.

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

Knox, Ronald

18.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

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.

What's the point of havin'a rapier wit if I can't use it to stab people?

Jeph Jacques

21.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

22.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

23.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

24.

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

Fredrich

25.

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

Trilling, Lionel

26.

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

Bruce, Lenny

27.

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

Clark, Dick

28.

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

29.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

30.

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.

31.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

32.

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

A. Whitney Brown

33.

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

34.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

35.

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

36.

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

Wilson, Flip

37.

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

38.

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

James Thurber

39.

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

40.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

41.

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

Strachey, Lionel

42.

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

Johnson, Samuel

43.

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

Conrad, Joseph

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Salma Hayek

47.

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

48.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

49.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

50.

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