Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

1.

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

Fredrich

2.

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

Seabury, David

3.

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

4.

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

Procter, J. J.

5.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

6.

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

Strachey, Lionel

7.

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

8.

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

9.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

10.

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

11.

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

Trilling, Lionel

12.

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

13.

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

James Thurber

14.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

15.

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

Joubert, Joseph

16.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

17.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

18.

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

19.

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

Williamson, Nicol

20.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

Twain, Mark

21.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

22.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

23.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

24.

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

Conrad, Joseph

25.

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

26.

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

Horace

27.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

28.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

29.

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

30.

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

Warhol, Andy

31.

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

Hughes, Langston

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Charlie Chaplin

35.

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

Nelson, Lord

36.

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

Socrates

37.

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

Eva Hoffman

38.

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

Bill Nye

39.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

40.

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

41.

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

Jeph Jacques

42.

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

43.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

44.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

45.

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

46.

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

Knox, Ronald

47.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

48.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

49.

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