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

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

Eco, Umberto

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

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

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

Wilson, Flip

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

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

10.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

11.

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.

12.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

13.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

14.

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

15.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

16.

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

Hughes, Langston

17.

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

Diller, Phyllis

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

21.

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

Nelson, Lord

22.

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

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 also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

25.

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

James Thurber

26.

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

Conrad, Joseph

27.

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

Horace Walpole

28.

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

29.

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

Martin, Steve

30.

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

Horace

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

34.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Martin, Steve

39.

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

Strachey, Lionel

40.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

41.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

42.

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

Trilling, Lionel

43.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

44.

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

45.

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

Mel Brooks

46.

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

Knox, Ronald

47.

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

Gary, Roman

48.

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

James Thurber

49.

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

50.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle