Motivational Quotes

Humor

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

- Pico Iyer

Best Quotes about Humor

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

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

Procter, J. J.

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

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

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

Nelson, Lord

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

Twain, Mark

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

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

10.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

11.

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

A. Whitney Brown

12.

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

Williamson, Nicol

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Even the gods love jokes.

Plato

16.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

17.

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

Edward De Bono

18.

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

Horace

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

James Thurber

22.

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

Dick Clark

23.

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

24.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

25.

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

26.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

Pico Iyer

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Jeph Jacques

30.

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

Clark, Dick

31.

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

32.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

33.

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

34.

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

Knox, Ronald

35.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.