“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 misfortunes.”

Bert Williams, The comic side of trouble, January 1918, American Magazine 85, 33-34, 58-60. Quoted in From traveling show to vaudeville: theatrical spectacle in America, 1830-1910, 2003, Robert M. Lewis, JHU Press, ISBN 0801870879.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "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 misfo…" by Bert Williams?
Bert Williams photo
Bert Williams 2
American comedian and actor 1874–1922

Related quotes

Epictetus photo

“God hath introduced Man to be a spectator of Himself and of His works; and”

Epictetus (50–138) philosopher from Ancient Greece

Golden Sayings of Epictetus
Context: But God hath introduced Man to be a spectator of Himself and of His works; and not a spectator only, but also an interpreter of them. Wherefore it is a shame for man to begin and to leave off where the brutes do. Rather he should begin there, and leave off where Nature leaves off in us: and that is at contemplation, and understanding, and a manner of life that is in harmony with herself. See then that ye die not without being spectators of these things. (13).

H.L. Mencken photo

“A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

15
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
Context: Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.

Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben photo

“The man dissatisfied with the world will be dissatisfied with himself, so as to be continually eaten up by his own ill humor. And in such a state of mind how can he retain health?”

Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben (1806–1849) Austrian psychiatrist, poet and philosopher

The Dietetics of the Soul; Or, True Mental Discipline (1838)

Bertrand Russell photo

“No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Dreams and Facts (1919)
1910s

Miguel de Unamuno photo

“It has often been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather than to be someone else without them.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), I : The Man of Flesh and Bone
Context: It has often been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather than to be someone else without them. For unfortunate men, when they preserve their normality in their misfortune — that is to say, when they endeavor to persist in their own being — prefer misfortune to non-existence. For myself I can say that when a as a youth, and even as a child, I remained unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a furious hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite for divinity, as one of our ascetics [San Juan de los Angeles] has put it.

Plato photo
Brian W. Aldiss photo

“Civilisation is the distance that man has placed between himself and his own excreta.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Source: The Dark Light Years

L. Ron Hubbard photo

“Freedom is for honest people. No man who is not himself honest can be free — he is in his own trap.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

"Honest People Have Rights, Too" (8 February 1960).
Scientology Bulletins

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa photo

“A man sometimes devotes his life to a desire which he is not sure will ever be fulfilled. Those who laugh at this folly are, after all, no more than mere spectators of life.”

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) Japanese writer

Yam Gruel (1916), in Rashomon and Other Stories https://books.google.it/books?id=DYHQAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT29 (Tuttle, 2011).

Related topics