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

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

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

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

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

Diller, Phyllis

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

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

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

10.

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

Lewis Mumford

11.

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

12.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

13.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

14.

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

Trilling, Lionel

15.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

16.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

17.

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

18.

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

Salma Hayek

19.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

20.

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

21.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

22.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

23.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

24.

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

25.

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

Edward De Bono

26.

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

Clark, Dick

27.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

31.

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

Conrad, Joseph

32.

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

Gary, Roman

33.

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

Johnson, Samuel

34.

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

Martin, Steve

35.

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

Seabury, David

36.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

37.

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

Bill Nye

38.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

39.

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

40.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

41.

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

44.

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

Bruce, Lenny

45.

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

Hughes, Langston

46.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

47.

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

48.

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

A. Whitney Brown

49.

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

Eco, Umberto

50.

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

Charlie Chaplin