Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about Humor

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

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

James Thurber

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

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

Lewis Mumford

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

Maclaine, Shirley

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

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

Eva Hoffman

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

10.

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

Gary, Roman

11.

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

Clark, Dick

12.

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

Herold, Don

13.

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

Martin, Steve

14.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

15.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

16.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

17.

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

Albee, Edward

18.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

19.

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

Fredrich

20.

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

Williamson, Nicol

21.

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

22.

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

Rourke, Constance

23.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

27.

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

28.

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

Johnson, Samuel

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.

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

31.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Warhol, Andy

35.

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

36.

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

Knox, Ronald

37.

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

Conrad, Joseph

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

41.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

42.

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

43.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

44.

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

Twain, Mark

45.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

46.

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

Socrates

47.

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

48.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

49.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

50.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg