Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Hughes, Langston

Best Quotes about Humor

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

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

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

Rourke, Constance

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

Diller, Phyllis

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

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

Martin, Steve

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

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

10.

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.

Mel Brooks

11.

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

Charlie Chaplin

12.

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

Knox, Ronald

13.

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

Lewis Mumford

14.

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

15.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

16.

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

Horace

17.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

18.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

19.

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

Socrates

20.

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

Hughes, Langston

21.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

22.

A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs-jolted by every pebble in the road.

Beecher, Henry Ward

23.

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

Clark, Dick

24.

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

25.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

26.

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

Conrad, Joseph

27.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

28.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

29.

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

Joubert, Joseph

30.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

31.

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

32.

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

Jeph Jacques

33.

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

Mary Hirsch

34.

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

Trilling, Lionel

35.

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

36.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

41.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

42.

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

43.

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

Twain, Mark

44.

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

45.

We never respect those who amuse us, however we may smile at their comic powers.

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

46.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

47.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

48.

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

49.

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

Dick Clark

50.

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