Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Horace

Best Quotes about Humor

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

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

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

Clark, Dick

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

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

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

James Thurber

10.

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

11.

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

Martin, Steve

12.

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

Jeph Jacques

13.

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

14.

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

Johnson, Samuel

15.

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

Hughes, Langston

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Diller, Phyllis

20.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

21.

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

Gary, Roman

22.

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

Charlie Chaplin

23.

If you can make a woman laugh you can do anything with her.

Williamson, Nicol

24.

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

25.

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

Seabury, David

26.

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

Knox, Ronald

27.

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

28.

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

29.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

30.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

31.

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

Herold, Don

32.

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

33.

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

34.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

35.

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

36.

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

Martin, Steve

37.

Isn't it sad how some people can't be funny, so they have to settle for being obnoxious?

38.

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

39.

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

James Thurber

40.

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

Conrad, Joseph

41.

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

Fredrich

42.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

43.

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

Lewis Mumford

44.

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

45.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

46.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

47.

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

Socrates

48.

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

49.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

50.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma