Motivational Quotes

Humor

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

- Swift, Jonathan

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Horace

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

A. Whitney Brown

Never say a humorous thing to a man who does not possess humor. He will always use it in evidence against you.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

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

Seabury, David

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

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

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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

10.

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

Diller, Phyllis

11.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

12.

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

13.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

14.

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

15.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

16.

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

Mary Hirsch

17.

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

Johnson, Samuel

18.

An emotional man may possess no humor, but a humorous man usually has deep pockets of emotion, sometimes tucked away or forgotten.

Rourke, Constance

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Proverb, Chinese

23.

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

Clark, Dick

24.

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

Martin, Steve

25.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

26.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

27.

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

28.

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

29.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

30.

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

31.

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

Twain, Mark

32.

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

Mel Brooks

33.

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

Horace Walpole

34.

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

Charlie Chaplin

35.

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

36.

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

James Thurber

37.

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

38.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

39.

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

Strachey, Lionel

40.

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

Nelson, Lord

41.

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

Fredrich

42.

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

43.

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

Martin, Steve

44.

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

45.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

46.

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

47.

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

Williamson, Nicol

48.

Where ever you find humor, you find pathos close by it side.

Whipple, Edwin P.

49.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

50.

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