Motivational Quotes

Humor

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

- T. S. Eliot

Best Quotes about 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.

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

Socrates

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

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

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

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

Rourke, Constance

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

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

10.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

11.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

12.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

13.

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

Diller, Phyllis

14.

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

Procter, J. J.

15.

Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.

Kleiser, Grenville

16.

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

Gary, Roman

17.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

18.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

19.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

20.

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

Knox, Ronald

21.

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

Nelson, Lord

22.

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

23.

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

A. Whitney Brown

24.

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

25.

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

Dick Clark

26.

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

James Thurber

27.

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

Joubert, Joseph

28.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

29.

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

Johnson, Samuel

30.

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

Albee, Edward

31.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

32.

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

33.

Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.

Lewis Mumford

34.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

35.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

36.

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

Seabury, David

37.

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

38.

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

Warhol, Andy

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Strachey, Lionel

42.

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

43.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

44.

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

Fredrich

45.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

46.

The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.

Bruce, Lenny

47.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

48.

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

49.

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

Hughes, Langston

50.

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

Horace Walpole