Motivational Quotes

Humor

A rich man's joke is always funny.

- Brown, Thomas Edward

Best Quotes about Humor

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

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

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

Maclaine, Shirley

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

Nelson, Lord

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

Strachey, Lionel

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

Mel Brooks

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

10.

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

11.

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

Johnson, Samuel

12.

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

Mary Hirsch

13.

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

Rourke, Constance

14.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

15.

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

Salma Hayek

16.

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

Trilling, Lionel

17.

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

Eco, Umberto

18.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

19.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

20.

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

21.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

22.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

23.

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

24.

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

Warhol, Andy

25.

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

26.

People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

Bill Nye

30.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

31.

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

Dick Clark

32.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

36.

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

37.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

38.

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

Bruce, Lenny

39.

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

40.

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

Gary, Roman

41.

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

Fredrich

42.

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

Lewis Mumford

43.

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

Socrates

44.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

45.

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

46.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower