Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Strachey, Lionel

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

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

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

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

Wilson, Flip

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

Horace

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

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

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

Knox, Ronald

10.

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

11.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

12.

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

13.

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

Eva Hoffman

14.

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

Trilling, Lionel

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Twain, Mark

18.

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

19.

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

Gary, Roman

20.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

21.

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

Bill Nye

22.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

23.

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

24.

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

Horace Walpole

25.

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

James Thurber

26.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

27.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

28.

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

Edward De Bono

29.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

30.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

31.

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

Clark, Dick

32.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

33.

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

Fredrich

34.

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

35.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

36.

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

37.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

38.

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

39.

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

Johnson, Samuel

40.

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

Martin, Steve

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

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.

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

Martin, Steve

46.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

47.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

48.

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

49.

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

Socrates

50.

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