Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Nelson, Lord

Best Quotes about Humor

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

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

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

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

Bill Nye

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Horace Walpole

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

Hughes, Langston

Comedy may be big business but it isn't pretty.

Martin, Steve

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

13.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

14.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

15.

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

Martin, Steve

16.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

17.

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

Strachey, Lionel

18.

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

19.

That is the saving grace of humor, if you fail no one is laughing at you.

A. Whitney Brown

20.

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

Herold, Don

21.

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

Edward De Bono

22.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

23.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

24.

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

25.

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

James Thurber

26.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

27.

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

Warhol, Andy

28.

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

Seabury, David

29.

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

Salma Hayek

30.

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

Socrates

31.

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

32.

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

Fredrich

33.

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

34.

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

Johnson, Samuel

35.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

36.

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

37.

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

Lewis Mumford

38.

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

39.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

Trilling, Lionel

43.

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

44.

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

Albee, Edward

45.

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

46.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

47.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

48.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

49.

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

50.

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

Jeph Jacques