Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Clark, Dick

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Horace

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

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

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

Trilling, Lionel

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

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

Herold, Don

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

Strachey, Lionel

Burt Reynolds once asked me out. I was in his room.

Diller, Phyllis

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

10.

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

Socrates

11.

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

12.

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

Nelson, Lord

13.

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.

14.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

15.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

16.

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

Hughes, Langston

17.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

18.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

19.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

20.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

21.

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

22.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

23.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

24.

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

Seabury, David

25.

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

Mary Hirsch

26.

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

Jeph Jacques

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

31.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

32.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

33.

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

Fredrich

34.

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

James Thurber

35.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

36.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

37.

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

Conrad, Joseph

38.

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

Lewis Mumford

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

42.

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

43.

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

Dick Clark

44.

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

Eva Hoffman

45.

Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.

Martin, Steve

46.

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