Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Knox, Ronald

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Twain, Mark

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.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

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

Trilling, Lionel

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

Horace

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

Proverb, Chinese

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

Never say a humorous thing to a man who does not possess humor. He will always use it in evidence against you.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

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

10.

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

11.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

12.

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

13.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

14.

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

15.

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

Dick Clark

16.

Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.

Edward De Bono

17.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

18.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

19.

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

20.

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

Diller, Phyllis

21.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

22.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

23.

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

24.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Johnson, Samuel

28.

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

29.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Procter, J. J.

33.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

34.

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

Albee, Edward

35.

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

Socrates

36.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

37.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

38.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

39.

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

Joubert, Joseph

40.

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

Warhol, Andy

41.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

42.

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

Hughes, Langston

43.

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

Herold, Don

44.

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

A. Whitney Brown

45.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

46.

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

47.

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

Charlie Chaplin

48.

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

Nelson, Lord

49.

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

Salma Hayek

50.

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.