Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Kathryn L. Nelson

Best Quotes about Humor

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

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

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

Procter, J. J.

If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.

Gandhi, Mahatma

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

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

Williamson, Nicol

10.

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

Charlie Chaplin

11.

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

Nelson, Lord

12.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

13.

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

James Thurber

14.

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

15.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

16.

Isn't it sad how some people can't be funny, so they have to settle for being obnoxious?

17.

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

Twain, Mark

18.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

19.

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

Trilling, Lionel

20.

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

Socrates

21.

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

A. Whitney Brown

22.

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

Albee, Edward

23.

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

24.

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

Conrad, Joseph

25.

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

Martin, Steve

26.

We never respect those who amuse us, however we may smile at their comic powers.

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

27.

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

Warhol, Andy

28.

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

Lewis Mumford

29.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

30.

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

31.

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

Dick Clark

32.

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

33.

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

Gary, Roman

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

38.

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

39.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

40.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

41.

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

Wilson, Flip

42.

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