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

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

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

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

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

What's the point of havin'a rapier wit if I can't use it to stab people?

Jeph Jacques

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

Wilson, Flip

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

Procter, J. J.

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

Edward De Bono

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

10.

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

Mel Brooks

11.

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

12.

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

Dick Clark

13.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

14.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

15.

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

16.

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

Twain, Mark

17.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

18.

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

19.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

20.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

21.

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

22.

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

James Thurber

23.

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

24.

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

25.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

26.

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

27.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

33.

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

Albee, Edward

34.

Life is tough, and if you have the ability to laugh at it you have the ability to enjoy it.

Salma Hayek

35.

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

Proverb, Chinese

36.

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

Hughes, Langston

37.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

38.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

39.

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

Herold, Don

40.

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

41.

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

Clark, Dick

42.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

43.

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

44.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

45.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

46.

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

Williamson, Nicol

47.

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

48.

If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.

Gandhi, Mahatma

49.

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

Eva Hoffman

50.

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