Motivational Quotes

Humor

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

- Reiner, Carl

Best Quotes about Humor

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

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

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

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

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

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

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

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

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Good humor isn't a trait of character, it is an art which requires practice.

Seabury, David

14.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

15.

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

Twain, Mark

16.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

17.

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

James Thurber

18.

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

Edward De Bono

19.

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

Dick Clark

20.

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

Nelson, Lord

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

24.

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

Diller, Phyllis

25.

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

26.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

27.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

28.

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

Eva Hoffman

29.

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

Procter, J. J.

30.

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

Rourke, Constance

31.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

32.

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

33.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

34.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

35.

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

36.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

37.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

38.

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

Charlie Chaplin

39.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

40.

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

Gary, Roman

41.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

42.

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

Bill Nye

43.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

44.

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

45.

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

Proverb, Chinese

46.

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

Wilson, Flip

47.

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

Knox, Ronald

48.

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

Lewis Mumford

49.

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

Herold, Don

50.

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