Motivational Quotes

Humor

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

- Rosten, Leo

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Eva Hoffman

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

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

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

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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

Bruce, Lenny

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

Twain, Mark

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

10.

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

11.

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

12.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

13.

I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell?

Warhol, Andy

14.

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

Lewis Mumford

15.

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

16.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

17.

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

A. Whitney Brown

18.

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

Hughes, Langston

19.

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

20.

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

Williamson, Nicol

21.

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

22.

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

Dick Clark

23.

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

Eco, Umberto

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Clark, Dick

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Joubert, Joseph

30.

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

31.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

32.

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

Horace

33.

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

Wilson, Flip

34.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

35.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

36.

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

Trilling, Lionel

37.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

38.

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

39.

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

Charlie Chaplin

40.

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

41.

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

Mel Brooks

42.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

43.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

44.

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

45.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

46.

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

47.

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

Seabury, David

48.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

49.

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

50.

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