Quotes About Humor

Whatever you have read I have said is almost certainly untrue, except if it is funny, in which case I definitely said it.

— Tallulah Bankhead

Wit lives in the present, but genius survives the future.

— Marguerite, Countess of Blessington

Make us laugh and you can pick all pockets.

— Clemence Dane

It is often a sign of wit not to show it, and not to see that others want it.

— Suzanne Necker

The man with the real sense of humor is the man who can put himself in the spectator’s place and laugh at his own misfortune.

— Bert Williams

Funny is an attitude.

— Flip Wilson

Impropriety is the soul of wit.

— W. Somerset Maugham

Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education.

— William Hazlitt

There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they laugh at.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

— Will Rogers

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

The man who sees the consistency in things is a wit; the man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist.

— G. K. Chesterton

The man who can make others laugh secures more votes for a measure than the man who forces them to think.

— Chazal

You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

With is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.

— Mark Twain

Humor is a painful thing told playfully.

— Charles W. Jarvis

The greatest advantage I know of being thought a wit by the world is that it gives one the greater freedom of playing the fool.

— Jonathon Swift

I don’t make jokes; I just watch the government and report the facts.

— Will Rogers

Of puns it has been said that they who most dislike them are least able to utter them.

— Edgar Allan Poe

I have never understood why it should be considered derogatory to the Creator to suppose that he has a sense of humor.

— Ralph Inge

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

— Malcolm Muggeridge

Brevity is the soul of wit.

— William Shakespeare

Men will let you abuse them only if you make them laugh.

— Henry Ward Beecher

Wit is so shining a quality that everybody admires it; most people aim at it, all people fear it, and few love it unless in themselves.

— Lord Chesterfield

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

— George Eliot

Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

— G. K. Chesterton

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

We are in the world to laugh.  In purgatory or in hell we shall no longer be able to do so.  And in heaven it would not be proper.

— Jules Renard

Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter.

— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

We are all here for a spell; get all the good laughs you can.

— Will Rogers

Laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects.

— Arnold Glasgow

If you don’t learn to laugh at trouble, you won’t have anything to laugh at when you grow old.

— Edgar Watson Howe

What I want to do is make people laugh so that they’ll see things seriously.

— William K. Zinsser

If you are not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don’t want to go there.

— Martin Luther

Laughter is a form of internal jogging.  It moves your internal organs around. It enhances respiration.  It is an igniter of great expectation.

— Norman Cousins

He who laughs, lasts.

— Mary Pettibone Poole

There are few who would not rather be hated than laughed at.

— Sydney Smith

The best ideas come from jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.

— David Ogilvie

Laugh and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone.

— Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Laughter is by definition healthy.

— Doris Lessing

The most wasted of all our days are those in which we have not laughed.

— Sebastien Chamfort

The man who laughs has not yet heard the news.

— Bertolt Brecht

My way of joking is to tell the truth; it’s the funniest joke in the world.

— George Bernard Shaw

Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of our superiority to all the befalls us.

— Romain Gary

If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different.

— Oscar Wilde