Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

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

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

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

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

Twain, Mark

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

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

Eva Hoffman

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

10.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

11.

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

Strachey, Lionel

12.

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

Nelson, Lord

13.

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

14.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

15.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

16.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

17.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

18.

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

19.

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

Charlie Chaplin

20.

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

21.

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

Williamson, Nicol

22.

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

Horace

23.

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

Bill Nye

24.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

25.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

26.

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

Procter, J. J.

27.

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

Jeph Jacques

28.

The happiness or unhappiness of men depends as much on their humors as on fortune.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

32.

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

33.

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

Proverb, Chinese

34.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

35.

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.

36.

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

Warhol, Andy

37.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

38.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

39.

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

Socrates

40.

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

Rourke, Constance

41.

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

42.

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

Conrad, Joseph

43.

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

Knox, Ronald

44.

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

45.

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

Dick Clark

46.

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

Salma Hayek

47.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

48.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

49.

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

Joubert, Joseph

50.

Any discussion of the problems of being funny in America will not make sense unless we substitute the word wit for humor. Humor inspires sympathetic good-natured laughter and is favored by the healing-power gang. Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down.

King, Florence