Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Eva Hoffman

Best Quotes about Humor

The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.

Bruce, Lenny

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

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

Hughes, Langston

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

Strachey, Lionel

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

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

Gary, Roman

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

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

10.

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

Lewis Mumford

11.

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

A. Whitney Brown

12.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

13.

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

Eco, Umberto

14.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

15.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

16.

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

17.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

18.

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

Mel Brooks

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

22.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

23.

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

Wilson, Flip

24.

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

25.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

26.

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

Eva Hoffman

27.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

28.

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

James Thurber

29.

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

30.

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

Salma Hayek

31.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

32.

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

33.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

34.

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

35.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

36.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

37.

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

Horace

38.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Socrates

42.

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

Mary Hirsch

43.

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

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.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

46.

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

Conrad, Joseph

47.

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

Dick Clark

48.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

49.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

50.

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