Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Fredrich

Best Quotes about Humor

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

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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

Charlie Chaplin

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

Eva Hoffman

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

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

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

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

Mary Hirsch

10.

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

Dick Clark

11.

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

Edward De Bono

12.

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

Albee, Edward

13.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

14.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

James Thurber

18.

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

James Thurber

19.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

20.

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

21.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

22.

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

23.

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

Knox, Ronald

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

27.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

28.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

29.

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

Mel Brooks

30.

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

Nelson, Lord

31.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

32.

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

33.

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

Warhol, Andy

34.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

35.

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

Bruce, Lenny

36.

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

Strachey, Lionel

37.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

38.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

39.

What's the point of havin'a rapier wit if I can't use it to stab people?

Jeph Jacques

40.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

41.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

42.

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

Horace

43.

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

44.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

45.

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

46.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

47.

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