Quotes about humor

Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.

— Joseph Addison

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

— Edward Albee

The secret to humor is surprise.

— Aristotle

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

— W. H. Auden

Imagination was given man to compensate for what he is not, and a sense of humor to console him for what he is.

— Francis Bacon

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

— Henry Ward Beecher

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

— Countess of Marguerite Gardiner Blessington

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

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

— Edward De Bono

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.

— Victor Borge

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

— Mel Brooks

A rich man's joke is always funny.

— Thomas Edward Brown

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.

— Lenny Bruce

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

— Lenny Bruce

Comedy is a tragedy plus time.

— Carol Burnett

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.

— Thomas Carlyle

In the end, everything is a gag.

— Charlie Chaplin

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

— Dick Clark

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

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

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

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Phyllis Diller

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

— Umberto Eco

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

— George Eliot

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.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Fredrich

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

— Mahatma Gandhi

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

— Roman Gary

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

— Don Herold

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

— Horace

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

— Langston Hughes

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.

— Washington Irving

I am a great friend to public amusements, for they keep the people from vice.

— Samuel Johnson

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

— Joseph Joubert

WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.

— Ellie Katz

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.

— Garrison Keillor

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.

— Florence King

Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.

— Grenville Kleiser

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

— Ronald Knox

One should never risk a joke, even of the mildest and most unexceptional charters, except among people of culture and wit.

— Jean De La Bruyere

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

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Fortune and humor govern the world.

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.

— Abraham Lincoln

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

— Shirley Maclaine

Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.

— Steve Martin

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

— Steve Martin

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.

— Malcolm Muggeridge

Wit is a weapon. Jokes are a masculine way of inflicting superiority. But humor is the pursuit of a gentle grin, usually in solitude.

— Frank Muir

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

— Lord Nelson

Even the gods love jokes.

— Plato

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

— J. J. Procter

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

— Chinese Proverb

A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

— Latin Proverb

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh

— Carl Reiner

Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else.

— Will Rogers

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

— Leo Rosten

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

— Leo Rosten

Anyone without a sense of humor is at the mercy of everyone else.

— William E. Rothschild

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.

— Constance Rourke

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

— David Seabury

Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.

— Gilbert Seldes

It is the saying of an ancient sage that humor was the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor.

— Lord Shaftesbury

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

— Richard Brinsley Sheridan

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.

— Alfred E. Smith

The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.

— Socrates

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

— Stephen Sondheim

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

— Laurence Sterne

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

— Lionel Strachey

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

— Jonathan Swift

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

— Lord Alfred Tennyson

As a person is so must you humor them.

— Terence

Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.

— William M. Thackeray

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

— James Thurber

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.

— James Thurber

Never say a humorous thing to a man who does not possess humor. He will always use it in evidence against you.

— Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree

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

— Lionel Trilling

Any man who has had the job I've had and didn't have a sense of humor wouldn't still be here.

— Harry S Truman

The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Source Unknown

Humor is a whisper from the soul, imploring mind and body to relax, let go and be at peace again.

— Source Unknown

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

— Source Unknown

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

— Source Unknown

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

— Peter Ustinov

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

— Andy Warhol

It's hard to be funny when you have to be clean.

— Mae West

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

— Edwin P. Whipple

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

— Nicol Williamson

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

— Flip Wilson

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.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

— Johann Georg Zimmermann

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

— (Frank) Gelett Burgess

Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humor?

— Frank Moore Colby

Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.

— Vaclav Havel

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.

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— Constance Rourke

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony.

— Rafael Sabatini

There's no trick to being humorous when you have the whole government working for you.

— Will Rogers

Humor is the sunshine of the mind

— Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton