Motivational Quotes

Humor

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

- Robert Benchley

Best Quotes about Humor

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

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

Herold, Don

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

A. Whitney Brown

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

Knox, Ronald

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, 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

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

Eco, Umberto

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

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

10.

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

11.

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

Trilling, Lionel

12.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

13.

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

14.

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

Warhol, Andy

15.

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

Edward De Bono

16.

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

James Thurber

17.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

18.

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

Lewis Mumford

19.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

20.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

21.

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

Nelson, Lord

22.

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

Dick Clark

23.

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

Proverb, Chinese

24.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

25.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

26.

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

Hughes, Langston

27.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

28.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

34.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

35.

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

Socrates

36.

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

Wilson, Flip

37.

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

Rourke, Constance

38.

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

39.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

40.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

41.

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

James Thurber

42.

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

43.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

44.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

45.

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

Mary Hirsch

46.

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

47.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

48.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

49.

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

Charlie Chaplin

50.

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