Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

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

Conrad, Joseph

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

Proverb, Chinese

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

Martin, Steve

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

Trilling, Lionel

A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

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

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.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

10.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

11.

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

Williamson, Nicol

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Knox, Ronald

15.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

16.

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

17.

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

Charlie Chaplin

18.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

19.

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

20.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

21.

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

Lewis Mumford

22.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

23.

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

24.

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

Hughes, Langston

25.

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.

Fredrich

26.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

27.

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

Joubert, Joseph

28.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

29.

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

Horace Walpole

30.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

31.

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

Bill Nye

32.

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

Edward De Bono

33.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

34.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

35.

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

36.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

37.

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

38.

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

Martin, Steve

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Mary Hirsch

43.

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

Wilson, Flip

44.

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

45.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

46.

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

Eco, Umberto

47.

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

Horace

48.

Even the gods love jokes.