Motivational Quotes

Humor

Fortune and humor govern the world.

- La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

Best Quotes about Humor

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

A. Whitney Brown

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

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

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.

Fredrich

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

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

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

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

10.

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

Dick Clark

11.

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

12.

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

Horace

13.

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

Horace Walpole

14.

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

Herold, Don

15.

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place.

Mark Twain

16.

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm

17.

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

Clark, Dick

18.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

19.

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

Bill Nye

20.

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

21.

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

Edward De Bono

22.

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

23.

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

Eva Hoffman

24.

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

25.

It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humor.

Maugham, W. Somerset

26.

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

Wilson, Flip

27.

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

Strachey, Lionel

28.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

29.

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

Hughes, Langston

30.

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

31.

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

Socrates

32.

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

33.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

34.

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

35.

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

Gary, Roman

36.

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

37.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

38.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

39.

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

40.

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

Trilling, Lionel

41.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

42.

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

43.

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