Motivational Quotes

Humor

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

- Sondheim, Stephen

Best Quotes about Humor

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

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

Herold, Don

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

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.

Charlie Chaplin

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

Eva Hoffman

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

10.

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

A. Whitney Brown

11.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

12.

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

Mary Hirsch

13.

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

14.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

15.

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

Martin, Steve

16.

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

Trilling, Lionel

17.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

18.

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

Procter, J. J.

19.

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

Nelson, Lord

20.

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

21.

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

22.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

23.

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

Horace

24.

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

Martin, Steve

25.

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

26.

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

Salma Hayek

27.

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

28.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

29.

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

30.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

31.

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

Warhol, Andy

32.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

33.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Johnson, Samuel

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

42.

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

Strachey, Lionel

43.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

44.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

45.

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

46.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

47.

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.

48.

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

Williamson, Nicol

49.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

50.

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

Mel Brooks