Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Conrad, Joseph

Best Quotes about Humor

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

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

Horace

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

Lewis Mumford

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

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

Nelson, Lord

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

Strachey, Lionel

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

Williamson, Nicol

10.

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

Edward De Bono

11.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

12.

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

Proverb, Chinese

13.

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

Charlie Chaplin

14.

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

Rourke, Constance

15.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

16.

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

Martin, Steve

17.

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

Seabury, David

18.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

19.

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

Johnson, Samuel

20.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

21.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

22.

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

Trilling, Lionel

23.

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

Eco, Umberto

24.

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

25.

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

26.

If you're at school and you're not that bright or good-looking or popular or whatever, and one day you say something and someone laughs, well, you sort of grab onto it, don't you? you think, well I run funny and I've got this stupid big face and big thighs and no-one fancies me, but at least I can make people laugh. And It's such a nice feeling, making someone laugh, that maybe you get a bit reliant on it. Like, if you're not funny then you're not... anything.

David Nicholls

27.

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

28.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

29.

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

James Thurber

30.

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

Gary, Roman

31.

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

Eva Hoffman

32.

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

Procter, J. J.

33.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

34.

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

35.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

36.

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

37.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

38.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

39.

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

40.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

46.

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

47.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

48.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.