Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Warhol, Andy

Best Quotes about Humor

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

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

Martin, Steve

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

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

Dick Clark

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

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

Conrad, Joseph

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 right honorable gentlemen is indebted to his memory for his jokes and his imagination for his facts.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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

Socrates

10.

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

Lewis Mumford

11.

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

12.

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

Knox, Ronald

13.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

14.

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

Mel Brooks

15.

Life is tough, and if you have the ability to laugh at it you have the ability to enjoy it.

Salma Hayek

16.

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

17.

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

Warhol, Andy

18.

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

19.

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

Eco, Umberto

20.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

21.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

22.

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

Mary Hirsch

23.

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

24.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

25.

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

Proverb, Chinese

26.

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

Strachey, Lionel

27.

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

Diller, Phyllis

28.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

29.

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

Seabury, David

30.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

31.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

32.

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

James Thurber

33.

One should never risk a joke, even of the mildest and most unexceptional charters, except among people of culture and wit.

La Bruyere, Jean De

34.

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

35.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

36.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

37.

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

Nelson, Lord

38.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

39.

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

40.

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

Gary, Roman

41.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

42.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

43.

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

Charlie Chaplin

44.

Humor is everywhere, in that there's irony in just about anything a human does.

Bill Nye

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Williamson, Nicol

48.

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

49.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

50.

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

Clark, Dick