Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

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

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

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

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

Diller, Phyllis

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

Lewis Mumford

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

Bruce, Lenny

10.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

11.

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

12.

A humorist is a person who feels bad, but who feels good about it.

Herold, Don

13.

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

Jeph Jacques

14.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

15.

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

16.

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

Socrates

17.

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

Strachey, Lionel

18.

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

Joubert, Joseph

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Clark, Dick

22.

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

Trilling, Lionel

23.

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

Procter, J. J.

24.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

25.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

26.

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

27.

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

Charlie Chaplin

28.

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

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.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

31.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

32.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

33.

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

Dick Clark

34.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

35.

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

36.

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

Williamson, Nicol

37.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

38.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

39.

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

A. Whitney Brown

40.

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.

41.

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

Eco, Umberto

42.

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

43.

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

Albee, Edward

44.

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

Martin, Steve

45.

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

46.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

47.

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

Salma Hayek

48.

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

Martin, Steve

49.

King, Florence