Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- James Thurber

Best Quotes about Humor

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

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

Fredrich

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

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

James Thurber

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

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

Eva Hoffman

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

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

Strachey, Lionel

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

10.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

11.

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

12.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

13.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Bruce, Lenny

20.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

21.

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

Horace Walpole

22.

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

23.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

24.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

25.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

26.

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

Horace

27.

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

James Thurber

28.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

29.

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

A. Whitney Brown

30.

I could not tread these perilous paths in safety, if I did not keep a saving sense of humor.

Nelson, Lord

31.

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

Trilling, Lionel

32.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

33.

We never respect those who amuse us, however we may smile at their comic powers.

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

34.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

35.

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

36.

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

Hughes, Langston

37.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

38.

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

39.

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

Albee, Edward

40.

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

Twain, Mark

41.

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

42.

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

Mel Brooks

43.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

44.

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

Wilson, Flip

45.

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

Dick Clark

46.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

47.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

48.

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

49.

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

Martin, Steve

50.

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

Mary Hirsch