Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Eva Hoffman

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Salma Hayek

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

Conrad, Joseph

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

Albee, Edward

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

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

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

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

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

Knox, Ronald

10.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

11.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

12.

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

13.

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

Hughes, Langston

14.

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

Eva Hoffman

15.

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

Rourke, Constance

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

20.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

21.

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

Twain, Mark

22.

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

Mary Hirsch

23.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

24.

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

Lewis Mumford

25.

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

James Thurber

26.

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

27.

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

Gary, Roman

28.

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

Edward De Bono

29.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

30.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

31.

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

Strachey, Lionel

32.

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

Socrates

33.

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

34.

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

Martin, Steve

35.

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

Joubert, Joseph

36.

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

37.

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

Fredrich

38.

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

39.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

40.

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

Trilling, Lionel

41.

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

Herold, Don

42.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

43.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

44.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

45.

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

Procter, J. J.

46.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

47.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

48.

One never needs their humor as much as when they argue with a fool.

Proverb, Chinese

49.

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

Clark, Dick

50.

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