Quotations: Humor

Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.
Aristotle

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

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.
Robert Benchley

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

Humor is just another defense against the universe.
Mel Brooks

That is the saving grace of humor, if you fail no one is laughing at you.
Whitney Brown

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

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

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

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

A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Humor is not a postscript or an incidental afterthought; it is a serious and weighty part of the world's economy. One feels increasingly the height of the faculty in which it arises, the nobility of things associated with it, and the greatness of services it renders.
Oscar W. Firkins

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

One doesn't have a sense of humor. It has you.
Larry Gelbart

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

A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
Clive James

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

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

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

Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.
Stephen Leacock

Humor is reason gone mad.
Groucho Marx

You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches them tolerance.
W. Somerset Maugham

A sense of humor is a major defense against minor troubles.
Mignon McLaughlin

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

There is such a thing as a hatred of lies and dissimulation, which is the outcome of a delicate sense of humor; there is also the selfsame hatred but as the result of cowardice, in so far as falsehood is forbidden by Divine law. Too cowardly to lie.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.
Agnes Repplier

I sometimes think that the saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities- a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

Love is an attachment to another self. Humor is a form of self-detachment -- a way of looking at one's existence, one's misfortune, or one's discomfort. If you really love, if you really know how to laugh, the result is the same: you forget yourself.
Claude Roy

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

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

Humor the sons of the poor, for they give science its splendor.
The Talmud

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

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.
James Thurber

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

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

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

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

This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.
Lin Yutang

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