Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Strachey, Lionel

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

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

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

Dick Clark

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

Diller, Phyllis

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

10.

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

Salma Hayek

11.

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

Mel Brooks

12.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

13.

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

14.

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

Eco, Umberto

15.

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

Wilson, Flip

16.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

22.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

23.

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

Carlyle, Thomas

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.

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

26.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

27.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

28.

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

Warhol, Andy

29.

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

30.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

31.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

32.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

33.

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

Martin, Steve

34.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

35.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

36.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

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.

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

A. Whitney Brown

39.

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

Trilling, Lionel

40.

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

Horace Walpole

41.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

42.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

43.

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

Martin, Steve

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.

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

Fredrich

46.

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

Gary, Roman

47.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

48.

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

Mary Hirsch

49.

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

50.

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