Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Whipple, Edwin P.

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

Rourke, Constance

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

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

Salma Hayek

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

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

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

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

Horace

10.

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

Clark, Dick

11.

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

Kathryn L. Nelson

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

17.

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

18.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

19.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

20.

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

Edward De Bono

21.

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

Joubert, Joseph

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.

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

James Thurber

24.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

25.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

26.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

27.

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

Lewis Mumford

28.

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

Martin, Steve

29.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

30.

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.

31.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

32.

All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.

Charlie Chaplin

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Proverb, Chinese

36.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

37.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

38.

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

A. Whitney Brown

39.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

43.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

44.

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

45.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

46.

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

Seabury, David

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.

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

Warhol, Andy

49.

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

Conrad, Joseph

50.

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

Knox, Ronald