Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

Best Quotes about Humor

1.

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

Joubert, Joseph

2.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

3.

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

Knox, Ronald

4.

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

Eva Hoffman

5.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

6.

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

7.

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

Horace

8.

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

Dick Clark

9.

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

James Thurber

10.

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

A. Whitney Brown

11.

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

Mel Brooks

12.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

13.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

14.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

15.

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

16.

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

Bruce, Lenny

17.

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

18.

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

Albee, Edward

19.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Martin, Steve

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.

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

25.

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

Gary, Roman

26.

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

27.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

28.

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

Bill Nye

29.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

30.

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

Eco, Umberto

31.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

32.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

33.

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

Procter, J. J.

34.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

35.

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

Horace Walpole

36.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

37.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

38.

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

39.

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

Herold, Don

40.

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

41.

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

Hughes, Langston

42.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

43.

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

Proverb, Chinese

44.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

45.

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

Trilling, Lionel

46.

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

47.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

48.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

49.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

50.

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