Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

Horace Walpole

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

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

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

Bill Nye

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

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

Trilling, Lionel

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

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

Clark, Dick

10.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

11.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

12.

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

Seabury, David

13.

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

Lewis Mumford

14.

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

15.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

16.

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

Jeph Jacques

17.

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

18.

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

Knox, Ronald

19.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

20.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

21.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

22.

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

Martin, Steve

23.

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

Twain, Mark

24.

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

Nelson, Lord

25.

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

Salma Hayek

26.

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

James Thurber

27.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

28.

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

Eco, Umberto

29.

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

30.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

31.

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

Strachey, Lionel

32.

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

Joubert, Joseph

33.

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

34.

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

Proverb, Chinese

35.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

36.

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

Conrad, Joseph

37.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Gary, Roman

41.

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

Edward De Bono

42.

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

Charlie Chaplin

43.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

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.

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

46.

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

Eva Hoffman

47.

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

Procter, J. J.

48.

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

Williamson, Nicol

49.

Rosten, Leo