Quotations on Humor

A sense of humor is what makes you laugh at something which would make you mad if it happened to you.

~ Unknown

Wit is far more often a shield than a lance.

~ Unknown

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

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are knocked off their earthly pedestals.

~ Agnes Repplier

Humour is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour, for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.

~ Aristotle

Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process.

~ E. B. White

Even the gods love jokes.

~ Plato

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

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

~ George Eliot

Humor comes from self-confidence. There's an aggressive element to wit.

~ Rita Mae Brown

There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.

~ Mark Twain

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

~ Virginia Woolf

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

~ James Thurber

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

~ Mae West

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

~ Will Rogers

If I studied all my life, I couldn't think up half the number of funny things passed in one session of congress.

~ Will Rogers

The teller of a mirthful tale has lattitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.

~ Charles Lamb

Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.

~ Charles Lamb

Don't try for wit. Settle for humor. You'll last longer.

~ Elsa Maxwell

I had thought, on starting this composition, that I should define what humor means to me. However, every time I tried to, I had to go and lie down with a cold wet cloth on my head.

~ Dorothy Parker

There's a hell of a difference between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

~ Dorothy Parker

There are very few good judges of humor, and they don't agree.

~ Josh Billings

We must laugh at a man to avoid crying for him.

~ Napoleon Bonaparte

It is a difficult thing to like anybody else's ideas of being funny.

~ Gertrude Stein

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

~ Don Herold

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

~ William Makepeace Thackeray

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

You row up the day you have your first real laugh, at yourself.

~ Ethel Barrymore

Jesters do oft prove prophets.

~ William Shakespeare

- King Lear