Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Horace

Best Quotes about Humor

1.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

2.

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

Strachey, Lionel

3.

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

4.

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

5.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

6.

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

James Thurber

7.

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

James Thurber

8.

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

Jeph Jacques

9.

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

Williamson, Nicol

10.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

11.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

12.

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

Gary, Roman

13.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

14.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

15.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

16.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

17.

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

18.

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

Eco, Umberto

19.

I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell?

Warhol, Andy

20.

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

Charlie Chaplin

21.

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

22.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

23.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

24.

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

Clark, Dick

25.

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

Joubert, Joseph

26.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

27.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

28.

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

29.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

30.

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

31.

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

Lewis Mumford

32.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

33.

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

34.

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

35.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

36.

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

37.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

38.

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

39.

Get well cards have become so humorous that if you don't get sick you're missing half the fun.

Wilson, Flip

40.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

41.

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

42.

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

Conrad, Joseph

43.

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

Dick Clark

44.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

45.

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