Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Conrad, Joseph

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Seabury, David

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

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

Charlie Chaplin

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

Herold, Don

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

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

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

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

Dick Clark

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

Edward De Bono

10.

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

11.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

12.

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

13.

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

Gary, Roman

14.

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

15.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

16.

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.

17.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Diller, Phyllis

26.

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

Socrates

27.

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

Joubert, Joseph

28.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

29.

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

James Thurber

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.

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

32.

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

Jeph Jacques

33.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

34.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

35.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

36.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

37.

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

Strachey, Lionel

38.

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

Twain, Mark

39.

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

James Thurber

40.

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

Conrad, Joseph

41.

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

Martin, Steve

42.

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

Procter, J. J.

43.

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

Clark, Dick

44.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

45.

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place.

Mark Twain

46.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

47.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

48.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

49.

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