Humor Quotes

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs. - Christopher Morley


But humor is too delicate and evanescent a thing to be extracted from a book like plums from a pudding. - Beatrix, "What to Read," The Household, supplement to Michigan Farmer and State Journal of Agriculture, 1884 September 30th


Humor is a reminder that no matter how high the throne one sits on, one sits on one's bottom. - Taki


Humor is merely tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn. - Irvin S. Cobb


Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.  - Francis Bacon


Humor results when society says you can't scratch certain things in public, but they itch in public.  - Tom Walsh


Humor has a way of bringing people together.  It unites people.  In fact, I'm rather serious when I suggest that someone should plant a few whoopee cushions in the United Nations.  - Ron Dentinger


Every survival kit should include a sense of humor.  - Author Unknown


Humor is the great thing, the saving thing.  The minute it crops up, all our irritation and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.  - Mark Twain


Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.  - James Thurber


Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds.  A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.  - William James


After God created the world, He made man and woman.  Then, to keep the whole thing from collapsing, He invented humor.  - Bill Kelly, "Mordillo"


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


The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.  - Peter De Vries


Humor is just another defense against the universe.  - Mel Brooks


Humor is reason gone mad.  - Groucho Marx


A sense of humor is a major defense against minor troubles.  - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.  - Peter Ustinov


Comedy has to be based on truth.  You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.  - Sid Caesar


Warning:  Humor may be hazardous to your illness.  - Ellie Katz


Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.  - Dorothy Parker




Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that humor excites in those who lack it.  - George Saintsbury


Humor is... despair refusing to take itself seriously.  - Arland Ussher


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


Wit.—Wit is the epitaph of an emotion. - Friedrich Nietzsche, "Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions" (#202, 1879), Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits, translated from German by Paul V. Cohn, 1913


The kind of humor I like is the thing that makes me laugh for five seconds and think for ten minutes.  - William Davis


Many a true word is spoken in jest.  - English Proverb


I think the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humor in it. - Frank A. Clark


If money makes the world go round, it's humor that keeps it from spinning out of control. - Craig Kimberley


Above all else: go out with a sense of humor. It is needed armor. Joy in one's heart and some laughter on one's lips is a sign that the person down deep has a pretty good grasp of life. - Hugh Sidey


There is no defense against adverse fortune which is so effectual as an habitual sense of humor.  - Thomas W. Higginson


Let your humour always be good-humour, in the double sense of the phrase:  if it comes from a bad humour, it is almost sure to be bad humour.  - Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Humor prevents one from becoming a tragic figure even though he/she is involved in tragic events.  - E.T. "Cy" Eberhart


Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully. - Max Eastman


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


Sometimes the best cure for life’s woes is a sense of humor. - Frank Sonnenberg


There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth. - Victor Borge, London Times, 1984 January 3rd


Someone once defined humor as a way to keep from killing yourself.  I keep my sense of humor and I stay alive.  - Abe Burrows


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


Humor is, I think, the subtlest 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