Motivational Quotes

Humor

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

- Sterne, Laurence

Best Quotes about Humor

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humor?

Colby, Frank Moore

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

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

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

Martin, Steve

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

Horace Walpole

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

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

Hughes, Langston

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

10.

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

Fredrich

11.

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

Trilling, Lionel

12.

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

13.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

14.

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

15.

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

Diller, Phyllis

16.

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

Gary, Roman

17.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

18.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

19.

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

20.

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

Charlie Chaplin

21.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

29.

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

30.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

31.

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

Procter, J. J.

32.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

33.

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

34.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

35.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

36.

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

Bill Nye

37.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

38.

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

39.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

40.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

41.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

42.

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