Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Hughes, Langston

Best Quotes about 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

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

Charlie Chaplin

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

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

Maclaine, Shirley

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

Edward De Bono

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

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

Lewis Mumford

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

10.

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

11.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

12.

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

Proverb, Chinese

13.

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

14.

An emotional man may possess no humor, but a humorous man usually has deep pockets of emotion, sometimes tucked away or forgotten.

Rourke, Constance

15.

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

Horace

16.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

17.

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

Johnson, Samuel

18.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

19.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

20.

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

Gary, Roman

21.

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

Knox, Ronald

22.

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

Wilson, Flip

23.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

24.

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

Diller, Phyllis

25.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

26.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

27.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

28.

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

Strachey, Lionel

29.

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

Martin, Steve

30.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

31.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

32.

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

Dick Clark

33.

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

Bill Nye

34.

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

Procter, J. J.

35.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

36.

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

Seabury, David

37.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

41.

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

42.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

43.

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

Warhol, Andy

44.

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

Albee, Edward

45.

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

46.

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

Herold, Don

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

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

Clark, Dick

50.

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