Motivational Quotes

Humor

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

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about Humor

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

Proverb, Latin

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

Horace

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

Edward De Bono

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

Proverb, Chinese

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

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

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

Procter, J. J.

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

Twain, Mark

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

Wilson, Flip

10.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov

11.

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

12.

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

Katz, Ellie

13.

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

Lewis Mumford

14.

As a person is so must you humor them.

Terence

15.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Mel Brooks

16.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

17.

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

18.

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

Clark, Dick

19.

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

Warhol, Andy

20.

The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.

Bruce, Lenny

21.

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

22.

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

23.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

Burgess, (Frank) Gelett

24.

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

Rourke, Constance

25.

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

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.

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

28.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

29.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

T. S. Eliot

30.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Rosten, Leo

31.

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

32.

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

Eva Hoffman

33.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

34.

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

Horace Walpole

35.

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

Joubert, Joseph

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Trilling, Lionel

39.

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

Williamson, Nicol

40.

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

Knox, Ronald

41.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.