Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

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

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

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

Williamson, Nicol

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

10.

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

Mel Brooks

11.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

12.

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

James Thurber

13.

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

Nelson, Lord

14.

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

Procter, J. J.

15.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

16.

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

Martin, Steve

17.

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

Clark, Dick

18.

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

19.

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

James Thurber

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Socrates

26.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

27.

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

Horace Walpole

28.

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

29.

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

Twain, Mark

30.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

31.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

32.

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

33.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

34.

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.

35.

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

Trilling, Lionel

36.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

37.

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

Conrad, Joseph

38.

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

39.

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

Fredrich

40.

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

41.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

42.

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

Lewis Mumford

43.

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

Eco, Umberto

44.

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

Seabury, David

45.

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place.

Mark Twain

46.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

47.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

48.

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

49.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

50.

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