Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Charlie Chaplin

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

The secret to humor is surprise.

Aristotle

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

Jeph Jacques

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

Wilson, Flip

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

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

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

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

James Thurber

10.

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

Horace

11.

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

Eva Hoffman

12.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

13.

Humor is a rubber sword - it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.

Mary Hirsch

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.

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

Lewis Mumford

16.

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

Seabury, David

17.

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

18.

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

Hughes, Langston

19.

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

Fredrich

20.

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

21.

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

Bill Nye

22.

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

Joubert, Joseph

23.

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

24.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Robert Benchley

25.

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

Diller, Phyllis

26.

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

27.

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

Conrad, Joseph

28.

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

Seldes, Gilbert

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.

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

Herold, Don

31.

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

32.

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

Strachey, Lionel

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.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

35.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

36.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

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

Clark, Dick

38.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

39.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

40.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

41.

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

Maclaine, Shirley

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Gary, Roman

45.

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

Knox, Ronald

46.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Sondheim, Stephen

47.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.