Motivational Quotes

Humor

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

- Rosten, Leo

Best Quotes about Humor

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

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

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

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

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

Martin, Steve

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

Charlie Chaplin

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

10.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

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

Bill Nye

13.

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

14.

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

15.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

16.

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

17.

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

Edward De Bono

18.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

19.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

20.

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

A. Whitney Brown

21.

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

Eva Hoffman

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Bruce, Lenny

25.

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

Eco, Umberto

26.

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.

Mel Brooks

27.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

28.

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

29.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

34.

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

35.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

36.

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

Johnson, Samuel

37.

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

Gary, Roman

38.

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

Socrates

39.

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

40.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

41.

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

Twain, Mark

42.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

43.

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