Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

Best Quotes about Humor

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

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

Lewis Mumford

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

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

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

Mel Brooks

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

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

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

10.

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

11.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

12.

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

Socrates

13.

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

14.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

15.

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

16.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

17.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

18.

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

Bruce, Lenny

19.

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

Martin, Steve

20.

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

Strachey, Lionel

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Jeph Jacques

24.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

25.

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

26.

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

27.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

28.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

29.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

30.

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

Martin, Steve

31.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

35.

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

Diller, Phyllis

36.

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

37.

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

James Thurber

38.

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

Knox, Ronald

39.

There is always some frivolity in excellent minds; they have wings to rise, but also stray.

Joubert, Joseph

40.

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

Edward De Bono

41.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

42.

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

43.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

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

Twain, Mark

47.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

48.

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

49.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

50.

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

Fredrich