Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- A. Whitney Brown

Best Quotes about Humor

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

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

Bruce, Lenny

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

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

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

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

Procter, J. J.

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

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

10.

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

Rourke, Constance

11.

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

Johnson, Samuel

12.

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

Knox, Ronald

13.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

14.

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

Williamson, Nicol

15.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

16.

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

17.

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

Proverb, Chinese

18.

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

Strachey, Lionel

19.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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.

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

22.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

23.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

24.

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

Edward De Bono

25.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

26.

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

27.

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

Mel Brooks

28.

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

Horace Walpole

29.

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

Warhol, Andy

30.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

31.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Charlie Chaplin

35.

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

Eva Hoffman

36.

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

37.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

38.

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.

39.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

40.

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

41.

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

Trilling, Lionel

42.

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

Eco, Umberto

43.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

44.

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

Lewis Mumford

45.

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

Martin, Steve

46.

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

47.

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

Twain, Mark

48.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

49.

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

50.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower