Motivational Quotes

Humor

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.

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Seabury, David

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

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

Williamson, Nicol

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

Humor is, I think, the sublets and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers

Rosten, Leo

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

10.

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

Salma Hayek

11.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

12.

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

13.

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

Socrates

14.

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

15.

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

Dick Clark

16.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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.

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

Horace Walpole

19.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

20.

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

Hughes, Langston

21.

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

Strachey, Lionel

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Proverb, Chinese

25.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

26.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

27.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

28.

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

29.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

30.

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

Horace

31.

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

Mary Hirsch

32.

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

Mel Brooks

33.

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

Wilson, Flip

34.

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

Warhol, Andy

35.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

36.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

37.

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

Trilling, Lionel

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

There are things of deadly earnest that can only be mentioned under the cover of a joke.

Procter, J. J.

44.

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

Joubert, Joseph

45.

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

Bill Nye

46.

One should never risk a joke, even of the mildest and most unexceptional charters, except among people of culture and wit.