Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Johnson, Samuel

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Edward De Bono

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

Sterne, Laurence

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

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

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

James Thurber

There's nothing like a gleam of humor to reassure you that a fellow human being is ticking inside a strange face.

Eva Hoffman

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

10.

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

Herold, Don

11.

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.

12.

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

James Thurber

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.

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

15.

The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

Horace Walpole

16.

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

Martin, Steve

17.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

18.

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

19.

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

20.

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

Albee, Edward

21.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

22.

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

23.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

24.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

25.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

26.

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

Eco, Umberto

27.

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

Johnson, Samuel

28.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

29.

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

30.

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

Joubert, Joseph

31.

A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Jeph Jacques

35.

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

Strachey, Lionel

36.

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

Clark, Dick

37.

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

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.

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

Twain, Mark

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Dick Clark

43.

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

Proverb, Chinese

44.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

45.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

46.

I could not tread these perilous paths in safety, if I did not keep a saving sense of humor.

Nelson, Lord

47.

Humor is everywhere, in that there's irony in just about anything a human does.

Bill Nye

48.

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

A. Whitney Brown

49.

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

50.

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