Quotes about humor

“Whatever you see you gotta keep a sense of humor; you gotta be able to smile through all the bullshit.”

“There's gon' be some stuff you gon' see
that's gon' make it hard to smile in the future.
But through whatever you see,
through all the rain and the pain,
you gotta keep your sense of humor.
You gotta be able to smile through all this bullshit.
Remember that.”

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”

“The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.”

“Humor is mankind's greatest blessing.”

“Humor is reason gone mad.”

“Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman”

“To my mind, a well-developed sense of humor is the surest indication of a person's humanity, no matter how black and bitter that humor may be.”

“Hang on to your humor. Do not ask for permission, just do it! Make everything fun.”

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

“There's a humorous side to every situation. The challenge is to find it.”

“The secret to humor is surprise.”

“It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.”

“In the thirty-three years he was in the Marine Corps, Col. Conroy concentrated on the task of defending his country and he did so, exceedingly well. In the next twenty-four years left to him, he put all his efforts into the art of being a terrific father, a loving uncle, a brother of great substance, a beloved grandfather, and a friend to thousands. Out of uniform, the Colonel let his genius for humor flourish. Always in motion he made his rounds in Atlanta each day and no one besides himself knew how many stops he put in during a given day. He was like a bee going from flower to flower, pollinating his world with his generous gift for friendships.”

“Not all cartoon humor is just about having bugged-out eyes and tongues flying out of people's heads.”

“I have often been downcast, but never in despair; I regard our hiding as a dangerous adventure, romantic and interesting at the same time. In my diary I treat all the privations as amusing. I have made up my mind now to lead a different life from other girls and, later on, different from ordinary housewives. My start has been so very full of interest, and that is the sole reason why I have to laugh at the humorous side of the most dangerous moments.”

“To the most trivial actions, attach the devotion and mindfulness of a hundred monks. To matters of life and death, attach a sense of humor.”

“A deep sense of humor and an unusual ability for telling stories and jokes endeared Johnny even to casual acquaintances.”

“What’s the point in having humor? Humor is to get us over terrible things.”

“Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there's humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd.”

“Thank heaven I don't inherit God from anybody! I am free to make mine up as I wish Him. He's kind and sympathetic and imaginative and forgiving and understanding - and He has a sense of humor.”

“The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.”

“Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.”

“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.”

“Explaining humor is a lot like dissecting a frog, you learn a lot in the process, but in the end you kill it.”

“Humor is tragedy plus time.”

“But it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in the most humorous sadness.”

“Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away and a sunny spirit takes their place.”

“Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he isn't. A sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.”

“A woman has to be intelligent, have charm, a sense of humor, and be kind. It's the same qualities I require from a man.”

“A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.”

“Solemnity, I don't know what it's for. I mean, what is the point of it? The two most beautiful memorial services that I've ever attended both had a lot of humor. It somehow freed us all and made the services inspiring and cathartic. But solemnity, it serves pomposity. The self important always know at some level of their consciousness that their egotism is going to be punctured by humor. That's why they see it as a threat! And so, dishonestly, they pretend that their deficiency makes their views more substantial.”

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

“Total absence of humor renders life impossible.”

“He kills her in her own humor.”

“Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.”

“Maybe if God gives you a handicap, he makes sure you've got a few extra doses of humor to take the edge off.”

“Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.”

“Imagination is a quality that was given to man compensate him from whats not. The sense of humor was given to console him from what is.”

“The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.”

“Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be.”

“Of course one worries about getting older - we're all fearful of death, let's not kid ourselves. I'm simply not panicking as my laugh lines grow deeper. Who wants a face with no history, no sense of humor?”

“I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees, and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humor (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.”

“Humor is an almost physiological response to fear.”

“We are now a mighty nation, we are thirty — or about thirty millions of people, and we own and inhabit about one‑fifteenth part of the dry land of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty‑two years and we discover that we were then a very small people in point of numbers, vastly inferior to what we are now, with a vastly less extent of country, with vastly less of everything we deem desirable among men, we look upon the change as exceedingly advantageous to us and to our posterity, and we fix upon something that happened away back, as in some way or other being connected with this rise of prosperity. We find a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men, they fought for the principle that they were contending for; and we understood that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity that we now enjoy has come to us. We hold this annual celebration to remind ourselves of all the good done in this process of time of how it was done and who did it, and how we are historically connected with it; and we go from these meetings in better humor with ourselves — we feel more attached the one to the other, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way we are better men in the age, and race, and country in which we live for these celebrations. But after we have done all this we have not yet reached the whole.”

“I admire the proud and cold who go adventuring on the paths of great and demoniac beauty, and scorn "man" — but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet out of a man of letters, it is this plebeian love of mine for the human, living, and commonplace. All warmth, all goodness, all humor is born of it, and it almost seems to me as if it were that love itself, of which it is written that a man might speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and yet without it be no more than sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.”

“Moreover, humour is itself but a superficial view of that which is in truth both tragic and terrible—the contrast between human pretence and cosmic mechanical reality. Humour is but the faint terrestrial echo of the hideous laughter of the blind mad gods that squat leeringly and sardonically in caverns beyond the Milky Way. It is a hollow thing, sweet on the outside, but filled with the pathos of fruitless aspiration. All great humorists are sad—Mark Twain was a cynic and agnostic, and wrote "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What Is Man?" When I was younger I wrote humorous matter—satire and light verse—and was known to many as a jester and parodist. … But I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest—the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”

“People ask what I am really trying to do with humor. The answer is, "I'm getting even." … For me, being funny is the best revenge.”

“The Large Testament is a hurly-burly of cynical and sentimental reflections about life, jesting legacies to friends and enemies, and, interspersed among these many admirable ballades, both serious and absurd. With so free a design, no thought that occurred to him would need to be dismissed without expression; and he could draw at full length the portrait of his own bedevilled soul, and of the bleak and blackguardly world which was the theatre of his exploits and sufferings. If the reader can conceive something between the slap-dash inconsequence of Byron's Don Juan and the racy humorous gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the vernacular poems of Burns, he will have formed some idea of Villon's style. To the latter writer – except in the ballades, which are quite his own, and can be paralleled from no other language known to me – he bears a particular resemblance.”

“If I didn't have a sense of humor, how could I stand this trial now?”

“Yes, I was a funny guy for a long time. When I started out, I just wanted to write humor. I wrote humor for kids. My very first book was called How to be Funny. It was about how to get big laughs at the dinner table and how to get laughs in school. Parents hated this book. I wrote joke books, like A Hundred and One Monster Jokes, and other joke books for years. I did maybe a hundred of them. I had a great time, and I did this humor magazine called Bananas for ten years. It was sort of Mad Magazine, but it was all in color, and it was great. That was all I ever wanted to do. I couldn't believe it. When that ended, I figured I would just coast for the rest of my career. That was it. I'd already done what I wanted to do. I had no idea what was coming up.”

“When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.”

“One can find in the Yiddish tongue and in the Yiddish spirit expressions of pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience and deep appreciation of human individuality. There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love. The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand and command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God's plan for Creation is still at the very beginning.”

“Mister Lincoln then took up the Massachusetts shoemakers' strike, treating it in a humorous and philosophical manner, and exposing to ridicule the foolish pretense of Senator Douglas, that the strike arose from 'this unfortunate sectional warfare'. Mister Lincoln thanked God that we have a system of labor where there can be a strike. Whatever the pressure, there is a point where the workman may stop.”

“He neither seeks nor avoids talking about his enemies. When he does speak of them, it is with pride without disdain, humor without rancor, reproach without bitterness, frankness without spite. And in the same way, he speaks of his rivals for glory only with deserved praises that conceal no hidden venom, which can certainly not be said of the praise they sometimes give him. But what I find in him that is most rare in an Author and and even in a sensitive man is the most perfect tolerance in matters of feelings and opinions, and the putting aside of all partisan spirit, even in his own favor; wanting freely to state his opinion and his reasons when the issue demands it, and even doing so with passion when his heart is agitated; but not blaming people for not adopting what he feels any more than he puts up with anyone's wish to deprive him of his feeling; and giving everyone the same freedom of thought as he insists on having for himself. I hear everyone talk about tolerance, but he is the only truly tolerant person I have known.”

“The modern economist has become even more insistent in his belief that the ultimate forces underlying economic development lie, strictly speaking, outside the economic sphere. As Meir and Baldwin put it, half humorously, “economic development is much too serious to be left to economists.””

“The believers have four signs: good humor, tactfulness, kind heartedness and openhandedness”

“"Faeries have no sense of humor."
"Oh, I wouldn't say that. There's a pixie nightclub downtown called Hot Wings. Not that I have ever been there."”

“Music played a large role in the survival of the black people in America — that and a sense of humor that just couldn't be enslaved.”

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, a child humanized or de-humanized.”

“The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.”

“Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever. By forever, I mean thirty years.”

“Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world. It was the tongue of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and Cabalists — rich in humor and in memories that mankind may never forget. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful Humanity.”

“That's part of our policy, is not to be taken seriously, because I think our opposition, whoever they may be, in all their manifest forms, don't know how to handle humor.”

“We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.”

“Childishness? I think it's the equivalent of never losing your sense of humor.”

“Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age.”

“His vigor was always infectious, his wit barbed, his conversation a mixture of obscenity and good humor. He was at once stimulating and overbearing. George was a magnificent soldier.”

“Cosmic humor, especially about your own predicament, is an important part of your journey.”

“Plus, humor is a good way to hide the pain. - Leo”

“Of all the secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood the most divine was humor.”

“You stand for nothing. You respect nobody. The music you dance to is devoid of beauty, its lyrics empty of humor or cleverness.”

“The universe may not always play fair, but at least it's got a hell of a sense of humor.”

“This morning the electricity came on for a few minutes, and when it did, Jonny said, "Hey, it's a black-on."
This is what passes for humor around here.”

“Humor keeps us alive. Humor and food. Don't forget food. You can go a week without laughing.”

“Your writing", she said to me, "it's so raw. It's like a sledgehammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness….”

“In my experience, there are two things that no one will admit to: having no sense of humor and being susceptible to flattery.”

“Humor is just another defense against the
universe.”

“I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.”

“A sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised.”

“You're my sister," he said finally. "My sister, my blood, my family. I should want to protect you"- he laughed soundlessly and without any humor- "to protect you from the sort of boys who want to do with you exactly what I want to do.”

“Absolute seriousness is never without a dash of humor.”

“Never lose your sense of humor. Tomorrow could be worse.”

“Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.”

“There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.”

“A rule of thumb with humor; if you worry that you might be going too far, you have already not gone far enough. If everybody laughs, you have failed.”

“My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness. Continue to allow humor to lighten the burden of your tender heart.”

“Any instructions?” Carpenter said.
“Yeah,” Shane said. “Shoot anybody who looks at Agnes funny. And anybody else you don’t like. I’m getting tired of this shi*.”
“Somebody needs a hug,” Carpenter said.
“Humor,” Shane said. “Har.”

“Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.”

“Good humor and laughter are far too wonderful not to come straight from the heart of God.”

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

“He thrived with passion and compassion, humor and style. We had him whether we know who he was or did not know, he was ours and we were his.”

“This story is not and never was meant to challenge anyone's faith; however, if one's faith can be shaken by stories in a humorous novel, one may have a bit more praying to do.”

“Chick Lit uses humor to reflect life back to us. It's a very comforting genre, and it's the first time our generation has had a voice. It's a very important genre for all of those reasons.”

“The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlights.”

“She was everything I wanted. She was beautiful and charming, with a quick sense of humor, and she supported me in everything I did.”

“My sense of humor will always stand in the way of my seeing myself, my family, my race or my nation as the whole intent of the universe.”

“Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.”

“Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It's unbridled, its unplanned, it's full of suprises.”