Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

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

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

Maclaine, Shirley

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

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

Strachey, Lionel

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

10.

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

Hughes, Langston

11.

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

Dick Clark

12.

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

13.

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

Horace

14.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

15.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

16.

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

Mel Brooks

17.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

18.

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

Socrates

19.

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

Gary, Roman

20.

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

Procter, J. J.

21.

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

Nelson, Lord

22.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

23.

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

Rourke, Constance

24.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

25.

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

26.

The hall-mark of American humor is its pose of illiteracy.

Knox, Ronald

27.

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

Horace Walpole

28.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

29.

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

Salma Hayek

30.

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

31.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

32.

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

Martin, Steve

33.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

34.

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

Eva Hoffman

35.

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

Twain, Mark

36.

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

Seabury, David

37.

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

38.

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

Martin, Steve

39.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

40.

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

41.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Herold, Don

45.

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

46.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

47.

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

Fredrich

48.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

49.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

50.

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