Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Herold, Don

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

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

Clark, Dick

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

Twain, Mark

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

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

Horace Walpole

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

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

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

Trilling, Lionel

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

Maclaine, Shirley

10.

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

11.

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

Horace

12.

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

Eco, Umberto

13.

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

14.

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

Knox, Ronald

15.

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

16.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

17.

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

Mary Hirsch

18.

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

Bill Nye

19.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

20.

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

Rourke, Constance

21.

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

Herold, Don

22.

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

23.

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

Martin, Steve

24.

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

Johnson, Samuel

25.

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

26.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

27.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

28.

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

Dick Clark

29.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

30.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

31.

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

Socrates

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

35.

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

36.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

37.

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

James Thurber

38.

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.

39.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

40.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

41.

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

Albee, Edward

42.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

43.

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

Eva Hoffman

44.

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

Procter, J. J.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

48.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

49.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

50.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.