Motivational Quotes

Humor

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

- Tennyson, Lord Alfred

Best Quotes about Humor

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

Seabury, David

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

Maclaine, Shirley

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

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

Martin, Steve

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

Horace Walpole

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

Jeph Jacques

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

Diller, Phyllis

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

10.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Twain, Mark

14.

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

Horace

15.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

16.

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

Wilson, Flip

17.

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

Williamson, Nicol

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

22.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

Swift, Jonathan

23.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

Reiner, Carl

24.

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

25.

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

Conrad, Joseph

26.

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

27.

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

Burnett, Carol

28.

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

29.

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

Charlie Chaplin

30.

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

Knox, Ronald

31.

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

Mel Brooks

32.

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

33.

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

Bill Nye

34.

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.

35.

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

Gary, Roman

36.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

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

38.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

39.

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

40.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

41.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Brown, Thomas Edward

42.

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

43.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

44.

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

Warhol, Andy

45.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

46.

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