Motivational Quotes

Humor

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

- T. S. Eliot

Best Quotes about Humor

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

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

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

James Thurber

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

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

Bill Nye

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

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

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

10.

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.

11.

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

A. Whitney Brown

12.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

13.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

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.

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

Charlie Chaplin

16.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

17.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

18.

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

Conrad, Joseph

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Herold, Don

22.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

23.

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

Bruce, Lenny

24.

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

Diller, Phyllis

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

29.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

30.

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

Proverb, Chinese

31.

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

32.

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

Edward De Bono

33.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

34.

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

35.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

36.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

37.

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

Socrates

38.

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

39.

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

Mel Brooks

40.

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

41.

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

Procter, J. J.

42.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

43.

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

Lewis Mumford

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.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

46.

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

Dick Clark

47.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

48.

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