Motivational Quotes

Humor

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

- Burnett, Carol

Best Quotes about Humor

1.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

2.

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

Herold, Don

3.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

4.

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

Dick Clark

5.

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

Strachey, Lionel

6.

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

Eva Hoffman

7.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

8.

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

9.

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

Mary Hirsch

10.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

11.

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

12.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

13.

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

Horace

14.

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

Martin, Steve

15.

Get well cards have become so humorous that if you don't get sick you're missing half the fun.

Wilson, Flip

16.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

17.

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

18.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

19.

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

20.

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

21.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

22.

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

Procter, J. J.

23.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

24.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

25.

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

James Thurber

26.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

27.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

28.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

29.

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

Edward De Bono

30.

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

Clark, Dick

31.

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

Albee, Edward

32.

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

Charlie Chaplin

33.

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

34.

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

James Thurber

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Conrad, Joseph

39.

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

40.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

41.

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

Salma Hayek

42.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

43.

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

Joubert, Joseph

44.

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

45.

An emotional man may possess no humor, but a humorous man usually has deep pockets of emotion, sometimes tucked away or forgotten.

Rourke, Constance

46.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

47.

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

48.

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

A. Whitney Brown