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

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

Trilling, Lionel

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

Eva Hoffman

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

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

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

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

Johnson, Samuel

10.

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

Hughes, Langston

11.

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

Albee, Edward

12.

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

Proverb, Chinese

13.

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

14.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

15.

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

Herold, Don

16.

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

Horace

17.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

18.

Get well cards have become so humorous that if you don't get sick you're missing half the fun.

Wilson, Flip

19.

The best defence against misguided arrogance is a keen sense of humour.

Kathryn L. Nelson

20.

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

Conrad, Joseph

21.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

26.

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

Dick Clark

27.

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

Joubert, Joseph

28.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

29.

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

Horace Walpole

30.

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

Seabury, David

31.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

32.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

33.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

34.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

35.

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

36.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

37.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

38.

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

Procter, J. J.

39.

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

Mary Hirsch

40.

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

41.

Isn't it sad how some people can't be funny, so they have to settle for being obnoxious?

42.

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

Nelson, Lord

43.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

44.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

45.

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

James Thurber

46.

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

47.

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

Bruce, Lenny

48.

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

49.

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

Lewis Mumford

50.

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