Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.

Edward De Bono

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

Horace

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

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

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

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

Bruce, Lenny

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

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

Fredrich

10.

Humor is a whisper from the soul, imploring mind and body to relax, let go and be at peace again.

11.

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

12.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

13.

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

Diller, Phyllis

14.

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

Mel Brooks

15.

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

James Thurber

16.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

17.

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

18.

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

Joubert, Joseph

19.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

20.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

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.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Herold, Don

26.

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

27.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

28.

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

Lewis Mumford

29.

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

Procter, J. J.

30.

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.

31.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

32.

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

Nelson, Lord

33.

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

Mary Hirsch

34.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

35.

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

Horace Walpole

36.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

37.

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

Strachey, Lionel

38.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

39.

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

James Thurber

40.

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

Conrad, Joseph

41.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

42.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

43.

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

Knox, Ronald

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Williamson, Nicol

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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