Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

1.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

2.

That is the saving grace of humor, if you fail no one is laughing at you.

A. Whitney Brown

3.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

4.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

5.

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

Warhol, Andy

6.

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

Seabury, David

7.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

8.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

9.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

10.

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

11.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

12.

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

Edward De Bono

13.

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

Rourke, Constance

14.

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

Socrates

15.

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

Williamson, Nicol

16.

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

17.

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

Hughes, Langston

18.

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

Proverb, Chinese

19.

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

Eco, Umberto

20.

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

Knox, Ronald

21.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

22.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

23.

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

Lewis Mumford

24.

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

25.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

26.

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

Joubert, Joseph

27.

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

Mary Hirsch

28.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

29.

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

30.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

31.

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

Conrad, Joseph

32.

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

Martin, Steve

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Strachey, Lionel

42.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

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.

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

Procter, J. J.

45.

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

46.

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

Martin, Steve

47.

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

48.

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

Trilling, Lionel

49.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

50.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley