Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- James Thurber

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Horace

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

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

Jeph Jacques

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

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

Mel Brooks

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

10.

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

Twain, Mark

11.

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

12.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

13.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

14.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

15.

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

16.

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

Gary, Roman

17.

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

18.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

19.

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

20.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

21.

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

Dick Clark

22.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

23.

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

24.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

25.

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

Wilson, Flip

26.

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

27.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

28.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

29.

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

30.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

31.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

32.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

33.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Life is tough, and if you have the ability to laugh at it you have the ability to enjoy it.

Salma Hayek

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Herold, Don

41.

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

Knox, Ronald

42.

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

Strachey, Lionel

43.

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

44.

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

Lewis Mumford

45.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Diller, Phyllis

49.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

50.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De