Quotes about humour (188 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“I'm possessed by love — but isn't everybody? Most of my songs are love ballads and things to do with sadness and torture and pain.
In terms of love, you're not in control and I hate that feeling. I seem to write a lot of sad songs because I'm a very tragic person. But there's always an element of humour at the end.”

Freddie Mercury (1946–1991) British singer, songwriter and record producer

As quoted in "I am the Champion" by Nick Ferrari in The Sun (19 July 1985) http://www.queenarchives.com/index.php?title=Freddie_Mercury_-_07-19-1985_-_The_Sun.

Pain , Hate , Love , Personality

“I'm very proud of being Jewish. It means I have a good work ethic, and you get Jewish humour and you're allowed to tell Jewish jokes.”

Daniel Radcliffe (1989) English actor

Guardian interview, Saturday 4 July 2009

“Humour is, in fact, a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer … Laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humour is fulfilled by faith.”

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) American protestant theologian

Source: Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

Faith , Laughter

“The best stories in the world to me are the ones that elicit a real emotion, but have humour.”

Jim Carrey (1962) Canadian-American actor, comedian, and producer

As quoted in This much I know: Jim Carrey, actor, 46, Los Angeles http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/oct/19/jim-carrey-interview by Tony Horkins in The Observer (19 October 2008)
Context: Comedic actors can be looked at as a lower form because we have to put ourselves in a lower place than most of the audience. I think lofty emotions are somehow considered more special. The best stories in the world to me are the ones that elicit a real emotion, but have humour.

World

“… to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humour, to make them visible so that can not be ravaged in the dark without great consequence.”

Eve Ensler book The Vagina Monologues

Source: The Vagina Monologues

Hunger , Pain , Loneliness

“When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.”

Christopher Morley book Parnassus on Wheels

Variant: When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.
Source: Parnassus on Wheels

Love , Life , Friendship , Books

“The heaviness of loss in her heart hadn't eased, but there was room there for humour, too.”

Nalo Hopkinson book Brown Girl in the Ring

Source: Brown Girl in the Ring

Loss , Heart

“I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine.”

Peter Ustinov (1921–2004) English actor, writer, and dramatist

Imagination , Hell , Wine

“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.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

"The Defence Remains Open!" (April 1921), published in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 54
Non-Fiction

God , Truth , World , Sadness

“It is just as ridiculous to get excited & hysterical over a coming cultural change as to get excited & hysterical over one's physical aging... There is legitimate pathos about both processes; but blame & rebellion are essentially cheap, because inappropriate, emotions... It is wholly appropriate to feel a deep sadness at the coming of unknown things & the departure of those around which all our symbolic associations are entwined. All life is fundamentally & inextricably sad, with the perpetual snatching away of all the chance combinations of image & vista & mood that we become attached to, & the perpetual encroachment of the shadow of decay upon illusions of expansion & liberation which buoyed us up & spurred us on in youth. That is why I consider all jauntiness, & many forms of carelessly generalised humour, as essentially cheap & mocking, & occasionally ghastly & corpselike. Jauntiness & non-ironic humour in this world of basic & inescapable sadness are like the hysterical dances that a madman might execute on the grave of all his hopes. But if, at one extreme, intellectual poses of spurious happiness be cheap & disgusting; so at the other extreme are all gestures & fist-clenchings of rebellion equally silly & inappropriate—if not quite so overtly repulsive. All these things are ridiculous & contemptible because they are not legitimately applicable... The sole sensible way to face the cosmos & its essential sadness (an adumbration of true tragedy which no destruction of values can touch) is with manly resignation—eyes open to the real facts of perpetual frustration, & mind & sense alert to catch what little pleasure there is to be caught during one's brief instant of existence. Once we know, as a matter of course, how nature inescapably sets our freedom-adventure-expansion desires, & our symbol-&-experience-affections, definitely beyond all zones of possible fulfilment, we are in a sense fortified in advance, & able to endure the ordeal of consciousness with considerable equanimity... Life, if well filled with distracting images & activities favourable to the ego's sense of expansion, freedom, & adventurous expectancy, can be very far from gloomy—& the best way to achieve this condition is to get rid of the unnatural conceptions which make conscious evils out of impersonal and inevitable limitations... get rid of these, & of those false & unattainable standards which breed misery & mockery through their beckoning emptiness.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 291
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

Life , Pleasure , Youth , Age

“The softer you find your child is, the more you are to seek occasions, at fit times, thus to harden him. The great art in this is, to begin with what is but very little painful, and to proceed by insensible degrees, when you are playing, and in good humour with him, and speaking well of him: and when you have once got him to think himself made amends for his suffering by the praise is given him for his courage; when he can take pride in giving such marks of his manliness, and can prefer the reputation of being brave and stout, to the avoiding a little pain, or the shrinking under it; you need nor despair in time and by the assistance of his growing reason, to master his timorousness, and mend the weakness of his constitution.”

John Locke book Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Sec. 115
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

Pain , Art , Courage , Thinking

“The British soldier is second to none in the communities of fighting men. Some may possess more élan, others may be better disciplined; but none excels him in all-round character. We require no training in bravery in Britain; we can trust to our own native manliness to see us through. So it is with the soldier. It is his natural pride which gives him his fighting qualities. How often he has stood firm before tyranny and oppression, the last hope of the free world! In the midst of the noise and confusion of the battlefield, the simple homely figure of the British soldier stands out calm and resolute—dominating all around him with his quiet courage, his humour and his cheerfulness, his unflinching acceptance of the situation. May the ideals for which he has struggled never vanish from the world! May he never be forgotten by the nation for which he has fought so nobly! I know better than most to what heights the British soldier can aspire. His greatness is a measure of the greatness of the British character, and I have seen the quality of our race proved again and again on the battlefield.”

Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein (1887–1976) British Army officer, Commander of Allied forces at the Battle of El Alamein

Memoirs (London: Collins, 1958), pp. 543-544.

Men , World , Hope , Home

“Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”

Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

On Not Knowing Greek http://books.google.com/books?id=lQLAv2zRY7MC&q="Humour+is+the+first+of+the+gifts+to+perish+in+a+foreign+tongue"&pg=PA36#v=onepage
The Common Reader (1925)

“As for the general idea of what one would do if certain of death in an hour—I fancy most persons in normal health tend to sentimentalise and romanticise a bit about it. For my part—as a realist beyond the age of theatricalism and naive beliefs—I feel quite certain that my own known last hour would be spent quite prosaically in writing instructions for the disposition of certain books, manuscripts, heirlooms, and other possessions. Such a task would—in view of the mental stress—take at least an hour—and it would be the most useful thing I could do before dropping off into oblivion. If I did finish ahead of time, I'd probably spend the residual minutes getting a last look at something closely associated with my earliest memories—a picture, a library table, an 1895 Farmer's Almanack, a small music-box I used to play with at 2 ½, or some kindred symbol—completing a psychological circle in a spirit half of humour and half of whimsical sentimentality. Then—nothingness, as before Aug. 20, 1890.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to a round-robin letter-writing group called "the Coryciani" (14 July 1936), quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S.T. Joshi, p. 339
Non-Fiction, Letters

Death , Health , Books , Age

“We are specially designed to appeal to the sense of humour.”

Oscar Wilde book De Profundis

De Profundis (1897)

Sense

“Everything I loved had been dead for two centuries—or, as in the case of Graeco-Roman classicism, for two milenniums. I am never a part of anything around me—in everything I am an outsider. Should I find it possible to crawl backward through the Halls of Time to that age which is nearest my own fancy, I should doubtless be bawled out of the coffee-houses for heresy in religion, or else lampooned by John Dennis till I found refuge in the deep, silent Thames, that covers many another unfortunate. Yes, I seem to be a decided pessimist!—But pray do not think, gentlemen, that I am utterly forlorn and misanthropick creature. … Despite my solitary life, I have found infinite joy in books and writing, and am by far too much interested in the affairs of the world to quit the scene before Nature shall claim me. Though not a participant in the Business of life; I am, like the character of Addison and Steele, an impartial (or more or less impartial) Spectator, who finds not a little recreation in watching the antics of those strange and puny puppets called men. A sense of humour has helped me to endure existence; in fact, when all else fails, I never fail to extract a sarcastic smile from the contemplation of my own empty and egotistical career!”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to "The Keicomolo"—Kleiner, Cole, and Moe (October 1916), in Selected Letters I, 1911-1924 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 27
Non-Fiction, Letters

Love , Life , Men , Books

“Lord Illingworth: Women have become too brilliant. Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humour in the woman.
Mrs. Allonby: Or the want of it in the man.”

Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance

Act I http://books.google.com/books?id=RHkWAAAAYAAJ&q=%22Women+have+become+too+brilliant+Nothing+spoils+a+romance+so+much+as+a+sense+of+humour+in+the+woman%22+%22or+the+want+of+it+in+the+man%22&pg=PA34#v=onepage
A Woman of No Importance (1893)

Women , Sense

“Thus parents, by humouring and cockering them when little, corrupt the principles of nature in their children, and wonder afterwards to taste the bitter waters, when they themselves have poison’d the fountain.”

John Locke book Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Sec. 35
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

Children , Nature , Parent , Water

“This I think is sufficiently evident, that children generally hate to be idle. All the care then is, that their busy humour should be constantly employ'd in something of use to them; which, if you will attain, you must make what you would have them do a recreation to them, and not a business.”

John Locke book Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Sec. 129
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

Hate , Children , Business , Thinking

“Hegel once observed that comedy is in act superior to tragedy and humourous reasoning superior to grandiloquent reasoning. Although Lincoln does not possess the grandiloquence of historical action, as an average man of the people he has its humour.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Comments on the North American Events (1862)

People

“As Speaker of the Lok Sabha he brought glory to the house of the people. He had been one of the most successful speakers of the Lok Sabha. Humour and wit had always been his close friends. And he could tackle all the difficult situations in a very tactful manner. He always tried to act as an independent speaker, even though politically he belonged to the ruling party. i. e. the Congress party.”

Neelam Sanjiva Reddy (1913–1996) sixth President of India

Source: Presidents of India, 1950-2003, p. 130

Housing , People , Success

“I fell in love with her for her sense of humour. If she ever lost her sense of humour, I would have to dump her. Then I'd kill myself because I couldn't live without her.”

Dean Koontz book Relentless

Source: Relentless

Love , Sense

“The older Nico got, the more juvenile Percy seemed to him, though Percy was three years older. Nico found his sense of humour equal parts endearing and annoying. He decided to concentrate on the annoying.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Sense , Parting

“Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it's exactly like love in three ways: it's pushy, it has no real sense of humour, and it turns up where you least expect it.”

Gregory David Roberts book Shantaram

Source: Shantaram

Love , Way , Optimism , Sense

“Humour is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.”

Romain Gary (1914–1980) French writer and diplomat

As quoted in The Harper Book of Quotations (1993) by Robert I. Fitzhenry, p. 223

“Once you have perceived that life is very cruel, the only response is to live with as much humanity, humour and freedom as you can.”

Sarah Kane (1971–1999) playwright from England

Life , Freedom

“Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity, than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

Truth , Stupidity

“It is a defect of God's humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.”

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Lady Croom, Act II
Source: Arcadia (1993)

God , Heart

“Good-humoured, unaffected girls, will not do for a man who has been used to sensible women. They are two distinct orders of being.”

Jane Austen book Mansfield Park

Source: Mansfield Park

Women , Girl

“I hope that the kind reader recognises this as a despairing attempt at humour.”

Nancy Springer (1948) American author of fantasy, young adult literature, mystery, and science fiction

Hope , Despair

“She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. You had better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles, for you are wasting your time with me.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Men , Smile , Time

“Sometimes humour is all we have to say the things that can't be said.”

Simon R. Green (1955) British writer

“A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

For Men , Sense

“Some people seem quite destitute a sense of humour.”

George Grossmith book The Diary of a Nobody

The Diary of a Nobody

People , Sense

“Good humour may be said to be one of the very best articles of dress one can wear in society.”

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) novelist

Sketches and Travels in London; Mr. Brown's Letters to his Nephew: "On Tailoring — And Toilettes in General" (1856).
Source: Sketches and Travels, Etc.

“(I’ve often noticed that people equate “having a sense of humour” with “being an insensitive moron.”)”

Sophie Kinsella book Finding Audrey

Source: Finding Audrey

People , Sense

“There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour.”

Rachel Cohn (1968) American writer

Source: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

World , Laughter

“Those who, like the present writer, never had the privilege of meeting Sidgwick can infer from his writings, and still more from the characteristic philosophic merits of such pupils of his as McTaggart and Moore, how acute and painstaking a thinker and how inspiring a teacher he must have been. Yet he has grave defects as a writer which have certainly detracted from his fame. His style is heavy and involved, and he seldom allowed that strong sense of humour, which is said to have made him a delightful conversationalist, to relieve the uniform dull dignity of his writing. He incessantly refines, qualifies, raises objections, answers them, and then finds further objections to the answers. Each of these objections, rebuttals, rejoinders, and surrejoinders is in itself admirable, and does infinite credit to the acuteness and candour of the author. But the reader is apt to become impatient; to lose the thread of the argument: and to rise from his desk finding that he has read a great deal with constant admiration and now remembers little or nothing. The result is that Sidgwick probably has far less influence at present than he ought to have, and less than many writers, such as Bradley, who were as superior to him in literary style as he was to them in ethical and philosophical acumen. Even a thoroughly second-rate thinker like T. H. Green, by diffusing a grateful and comforting aroma of ethical "uplift", has probably made far more undergraduates into prigs than Sidgwick will ever make into philosophers.”

C. D. Broad (1887–1971) English philosopher

From Five Types of Ethical Theory (1930)

Sense , Strong , Teachers , Reading

“I think humour can be a very lethal weapon. You make somebody a laughing stock and you kill him. But most journalists don't do it. They get angry, which doesn't serve the purpose.”

Khushwant Singh (1915–2014) Indian novelist and journalist

On Humour.
I Don't Know One Editor In India Who Is Well-Read

Thinking

“A culture is like the upright strands that you begin with in basket-making, round which you wind the texture of the basket itself: no sticks, no basket; no culture, no community. It is the grammar, the story, humour and good faith that identifies a community and gives it existence. It is both the parent and child of social capital. And the social capital of a community is its social life – the links of cooperation and friendship between its members. It is the common culture and ceremony, the good faith and reciprocal obligations the civility and citizenship, the play, humour and conversation which make a living community, the cooperation that builds its institutions. It is the social ecosystem in which a culture lives.”

David Fleming (1940–2010) British activist

Lean Logic, (2016), p. xxi, introduction http://www.flemingpolicycentre.org.uk/lean-logic-surviving-the-future/

Life , Friendship , Faith , Communication

“In the past the mood of the comic postcard could enter into the central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill's could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare's tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn postcards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers' windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish.”

Donald McGill (1875–1962) British artist

George Orwell "The Art of Donald McGill", in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (1984) Vol. 2, pp. 194-5.
Criticism

Literature , Mood , Past , Heart

“He made one laugh sometimes by speaking the truth, but this is a form of humour which gains its force only by its unusualness; it would cease to amuse if it were commonly practised.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Moon and Sixpence

Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 44, p. 157

Truth

“Humour very often consists of shrewd perceptions about people. It's usually fun at someone's expense. Nowadays if you're funny at anybody's expense they run to the UN and say, "I must have an ombudsman to protect me." You hardly dare have a shrewd perception about anybody.”

Robertson Davies book World of Wonders

"World of Wonders".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

People

“Then, above all, the English people have a curious sense of humour, rather than wit. Humour comes from the heart; wit comes from the brain. We can laugh at ourselves. Do you remember what Ruskin said? "The English laugh is the purest and truest in the metals that can be minted," and indeed, only Heaven can know what the country owes to it. Well, laughter is one of the best things that God has given us, and with hearty laughter neither malice nor indecency can exist. And of all men who have shown us what that laughter can mean, none was like Dickens, every one of whose characters is English to the marrow; and if I might mention a living writer, I think the truest Englishmen are found in Mr. Priestley's novels.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast from London (25 September 1933), quoted in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 13.
1933

Men , God , People , Thinking

“Good humour is the only shield to keep off the darts of the satirical railer: if you have a quiver well stored, and are sure of hitting him between the joints of the harness, do not spare him; but you had better not bend your bow than miss your aim.”

James Burgh (1714–1775) British politician

The Dignity of Human Nature (1754)

“Headmaster: Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.”

Alan Bennett Forty Years On

Act 2, p. 80.
Forty Years On (1972)

“Dissent is a legitimate and essential right in any democracy and modern politicians must accept this fact with tolerance. A sense of proportion — and a sense of humour — is a sign of strength, not a sign of weakness.”

Sting (1951) English musician

Joining with Amnesty International in condemning the Russian authorities’ treatment of Pussy Riot, a Russian punk rock protest band. "Sting condemns Russia's treatment of Pussy Riot musicians ahead of Moscow concert" Amnesty International (25 July 2012) http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/sting-condemns-russias-treatment-pussy-riot-musicians-ahead-moscow-concert-2012-07-25

Democracy , Sense

“Standing in the market square, so alive but void of life, We work and we sweat and we struggle through each day. As our efforts scar our hands, this world stains us with demands. It’s hard to see life’s humour in the business games we play. As we gnaw our nails with stress, our fists and hearts pound so carelessly. With every effort forward, how much more can we digress?”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

"The Prophet's Hands"
The Prophet's Hands (2003)

Life , World , Game , Business

“When drag queen Carlotta agreed to compere and sit for a portrait at an R-rated charity fundraiser in March, she was not prepared for the tool of trade of the artist. The painter was Pricasso, who releases his artistic side by using a particular extremity. Not to put too fine a point on it (and Pricasso couldnt), Carlotta hovered between humour and horror as her portrait came to life.”

Pricasso (1949) Australian painter

[Gold Coast Bulletin staff, The 2012 Yoohoo Awards, Gold Coast Bulletin, 29 December 2012, 34, Queensland, Australia, News Limited]
About

Life

“If you understand comedy, you understand life. Drama, death, tragedy – everybody has these. But with humour you've got all these, and the antidote. You have found the answer. It doesn't follow that because you are a good comedy writer, you're a happy fellow. I've got one of the most miserable faces in the world. I am only happy when I am working. If I'm not working, I get screwed up because my time is going, my life is slipping by.”

Eric Sykes (1923–2012) English actor and director

Quoted in The Guardian, Wednesday 4 July 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/jul/04/eric-sykes

Life , Death , World , Understanding

“Half of the human race lives in manifest obedience to the lunar rhythm; and there is evidence to show that the psychological and therefore the spiritual life, not only of women, but of men too, mysteriously ebbs and flows with the changes of the moon. There are unreasoned joys, inexplicable miseries, laughters and remorses without a cause. Their sudden and fantastic alternations constitute the ordinary weather of our minds. These moods, of which the more gravely numinous may be hypostasized as gods, the lighter, if we will, as hobgoblins and fairies, are the children of the blood and humours. But the blood and humours obey, among many other masters, the changing moon. Touching the soul directly through the eyes and, indirectly, along the dark channels of the blood, the moon is doubly a divinity.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"Meditation on the Moon"
Music at Night and Other Essays (1931)

Life , Women , Men , God

“Although German writers may sometimes have mispraised or overpraised their greatest mediaeval poet, it is certain that we find in Wolfram von Eschenbach qualities, which, in the thousand years between the Fall and the Renaissance of classical literature, can be found to anything like the same extent in only two known writers, the Italian Dante and the Englishman Langland; while if he is immensely Dante's inferior in poetical quality, he has at least one gift, humour, which Dante had not, and is far Langland's superior in variety and in romantic charm.”

Wolfram von Eschenbach (1170–1220) German knight and poet

George Saintsbury The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1897) p. 251.
Criticism

Literature

“It is plain that the present system of intensive farming cannot be defended. … Let us then be vegetarians, at least. For those who have recognized flesh-eating for what it is, the merest addiction, and one, as Shelley saw, to ‘kindle all putrid humours in (our) frame’ … for such moralists the step is easy. It is not necessary, rather it is incompetent, to kill and torture animals to eat.”

Stephen R. L. Clark (1945) British philosopher

Source: The Moral Status of Animals, p. 46

Animals

“… this refined language of Indian modernity – an Indian language that was actually first used as a first language by a home-grown cosmopolitan elite – enough to say, with or without humour, ‘Ami tomake bhalobashi’ (‘I love you’) or ‘Apni kothai thhaken?’ (‘Where do you live?). These stray statements performed an incantatory ‘open sesame’ – into the bounded, charmed, small-scale world of ‘Bengaliness’. The ‘honorary’ Bengali might be myopic; might be an aficionado of art-house cinema; might be politically left wing; might have taste for lyric poetry; a tendency towards the autobiographical; an appetite for fish; or display none of these traits.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

citation needed
On Modernity

Love , World , Art , Home

“We form at La Faucille now a little colony where concord and happiness reign, and have not even for enemies the bears of the country... We are situated in a very movable manner, however, on one of the mountains of the Jura, where the inn is the most remarkable building. For I must tell you that we enjoy the company of an unaccountable old man of sixty, who resembles poor Father Colombert as if it were he himself. He is of the ancient nobility. He held the grade of General under the Restoration, having had possessions, which he has lost by the changes. He consoles himself now by carrying all his fortune. With him, a much rarer lot it consists in good humour and strength and philosophy. I have never seen a more excellent man. He is here to search for plants and stones.”

Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) French painter (1812-1867)

Quote in a letter to Rousseau's mother, from the Jura, 17th August, 1834; as cited in The Barbizon School of Painters: Corot, Rousseau, Diaz, Millet, Daubigny, etc. , by D. C. Thomson; Scribner and Welford, New York 1890 – (copy nr. 78), pp. 111-112
1830 - 1850

Search , Mountain , Change , Country

“Lucid gems are made of water; just as Crystal, which has been concreted from clear water, not always by a very great cold, as some used to judge, and by very hard frost, but sometimes by a less severe one, the nature of the soil fashioning it, the humour or juices being shut up in definite cavities, in the way in which spars are produced in mines.”

William Gilbert (astronomer) book De Magnete

English translation by Silvanus P. Thompson (1900).
De Magnete (1600)

Way , Fashion , Nature , Water

“Reginald, in his way, was a pioneer.
None of the rest of his family had anything approaching Titian hair or a sense of humour, and they used primroses as a table decoration.
It follows that they never understood Reginald, who came down late to breakfast, and nibbled toast, and said disrespectful things about the universe. The family ate porridge, and believed in everything, even the weather forecast.”

Saki (1870–1916) British writer

"Reginald's Choir Treat"
Reginald (1904)

Family , Way , Sense , Universe

“903. Better have an old Man to humour, than a young Rake to break your Heart.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Heart

“Being Gentlemen and very far from the litigious humour of loving to wrangle about words or terms or notions as empty; they had before his coming in, readily agreed promiscuously to use when they pleased Elements and Principles as terms equivalent: and to understand both by the one and the other, those primitive and simple bodies of which the mixt ones are said to be composed, and into which they are ultimately resolved.”

Robert Boyle book The Sceptical Chymist

Physiological Considerations Part of the First Dialogue (16)
The Sceptical Chymist (1661)

Love , Understanding

“I think often, and never without a certain fear of Nessim's love for Justine. [-] It coloured his unhappiness with a kind of ecstasy [-] Yet one touch of humour would have saved him from such dreadful comprehensive suffering.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Justine (1957)

Love , Fear , Thinking , Suffering

“I'm afraid I'm a practical man,' said the doctor with gruff humour, 'and I don't bother much about religion and philosophy.'
'You'll never be a practical man till you do,' said Father Brown. 'Look here, doctor; you know me pretty well; I think you know I'm not a bigot. You know I know there are all sorts in all religions; good men in bad ones and bad men in good ones.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

The Dagger with Wings (1926)

Men , Religion , Thinking

“Sir — As a playgoer of forty years standing, may I say that I heartily agree with Peter Pinnell in his condemnation of 'Entertaining Mr Sloane'.I myself was nauseated by this endless parade of mental and physical perversion. And to be told that such a disgusting piece of filth now passes for humour!Today's young playwrights take it upon themselves to flaunt their contempt for ordinary decent people. I hope that the ordinary decent people of this country will shortly strike back!Yours truly,Edna Welthorpe”

Joe Orton (1933–1967) English playwright and author

Mrs
See above (p. 283 of the Orton Diaries)
The Orton Diaries (1986), The Edna Welthorpe letters

People , Hope , Country

“A sense of humour is a sense of proportion.”

Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese artist, poet, and writer

Sand and Foam (1926)

Sense

“His wicked sense of humour suggests exciting sex
His fingers focus on her
Her touches
He's Venus as a Boy!”

Björk (1965) Icelandic singer-songwriter

"Venus as a Boy", from the CD single Venus as a Boy (1993)
Songs

Sex , Boy , Sense

“Ad Aertsen succeeds in allowing his sense of humour to shine through the deep seriousness of his scientific ethos. He also has a very balanced attitude to the question of "theory or experiment."”

Valentino Braitenberg (1926–2011) Italian-Austrian neuroscientist

Braitenberg cited in: " Ad Aertsen - an expedition into the brain http://www.bcf.uni-freiburg.de/press/before-2010/articles/aa-exped-en.pdf" uni-freiburg.de, 2010

Question , Sense

“A prig is a pompous fool who has gone out for a ceremonial walk, and without knowing it has lost an important part of his attire, namely, his sense of humour.”

Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) English novelist

Source: How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day (1910), Chapter 12.

Fools , Sense , Parting

“I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humour.”

Edward Albee Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1961)

Sense

“In all thy humours, whether grave or mellow,
Thou 'rt such a touchy, testy, pleasant fellow,
Hast so much wit and mirth and spleen about thee,
There is no living with thee, nor without thee.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

Spectator, No. 68.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“It seemed too easy to claim that there was nothing new under the sun, that … our spear-wielding ancestors had been as wise and good as ourselves and that the onward march of rational thought had brought with it nothing but tragedy. Did any of these arguments take into account Ariane’s profile on her way up? Did they credit the impeccable logic of her hydraulic systems? And most of all, did not such bromides merely betray the resentment of a defeated and unimaginative class? I felt my allegiances shift to the engineers and technicians around me, these new medicine men who often sported baseball caps, and had a tendency towards unsophisticated humour. What astonishing creatures they were! What extraordinary horizons they had opened up!”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

[describing his sentiments after the launch of the rocket Ariane] pp. 163-164.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009)

Men , Way , Sport , Sun

“There are men whose sense of humour is so ill developed that they still bear a grudge against Copernicus because he dethroned them from the central position in the universe. They feel it a personal affront that they can no longer consider themselves the pivot upon which turns the whole of created things.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

"1901", p. 66
A Writer's Notebook (1946)

Men , Feeling , Sense , Universe

“Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.”

George Saintsbury (1845–1933) British literary critic

Source: A Last Vintage, p. 172.

Hostility

“I found that I simply couldn't take fantasy seriously, so it became humourous, and continued from there. I turned my home state of Florida into the Land of Xanth.”

Piers Anthony (1934) English-American writer in the science fiction and fantasy genres

As quoted in 100 Most Popular Genre Fiction Authors (2005) by Bernard Alger Drew, p. 11

Home

“Humour is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Said in 1821, as quoted in Letters and Conversations of S.T. Coleridge (1836) by Thomas Allsop

“A careful and sympathetic sense of humour can also be a great asset when there is need to get out of difficult situations gracefully.”

John Allen Fraser (1931) Canadian politician

Source: The House Of Commons At Work (1993), Chapter 4, The Office of Speaker of the House of Commons, p. 55

Sense

“The search for the sense of humour is as fruitless and as enduring as the hunt for the unicorn; the really wise man knows that the unicorn, being no reality but a life-enhancing myth, must never be hunted, and may only be glimpsed by the well-disposed and the lucky; it cannot be captured, and it is encountered only by indirection.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Life , Search , Reality , Sense

“"… If ever I murdered somebody," he added quite simply, "I dare say it might be an Optimist."
"Why?" cried Merton amused. "Do you think people dislike cheerfulness?"
"People like frequent laughter," answered Father Brown, "but I don't think they like a permanent smile. Cheerfulness without humour is a very trying thing."”

G. K. Chesterton book The Innocence of Father Brown

The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Three Tools of Death
The Father Brown Mystery Series (1910 - 1927)

People , Smile , Thinking , Laughter

“There is a kind of laughter that sickens the soul. Laughter when it is out of control: when it screams and stamps its feet, and sets the bells jangling in the next town. Laughter in all its ignorance and cruelty. Laughter with the seed of Satan in it. It tramples upon shrines; the belly-roarer. It roars, it yells, it is delirious: and yet it is as cold as ice. It has no humour. It is naked noise and naked malice.”

Mervyn Peake book Boy in Darkness

"Boy in Darkness," Sometime, Never (1956)

Soul , Laughter

“Twas the saying of [Georgias Leontinus apud Arist. Rhetor. lib. 3. cap. 18… which the Translator renders, Seria Risu, Risum Seriis discutere] an ancient sage that humour was the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour. For a subject which would not bear raillery was suspicious; and a jest which would not bear a serious examination was certainly false wit.”

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) English politician and Earl

Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709), Part 1, Sec. 5

Falseness

“If I had not become a painter,
I would surely have become a clown..
.. because I make people laugh..
.. Faces deformed
by suffering, humour or work.
Often crazy. They then became imaginary,
when I adorned them with movements
free colours depending on the head. The
colour too become clown-like”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

AF, 73; p. 161
Karel Appel, a gesture of colour' (1992/2009)

People , Suffering , Dependency

“Cynicism is humour in ill health.”

H. G. Wells book Boon

Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump (1915)

Health

“It was an experience of great interest to me to meet Premier Stalin … It is very fortunate for Russia in her agony to have this great rugged war chief at her head. He is a man of massive outstanding personality, suited to the sombre and stormy times in which his life has been cast; a man of inexhaustible courage and will-power and a man direct and even blunt in speech, which, having been brought up in the House of Commons, I do not mind at all, especially when I have something to say of my own. Above all, he is a man with that saving sense of humour which is of high importance to all men and all nations, but particularly to great men and great nations. Stalin also left upon me the impression of a deep, cool wisdom and a complete absence of illusions of any kind. I believe I made him feel that we were good and faithful comrades in this war – but that, after all, is a matter which deeds not words will prove.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Speech in the House of Commons, September 8, 1942 "War Situation" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1942/sep/08/war-situation#column_95.
The Second World War (1939–1945)

Life , Wisdom , Men , War

“You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humour teaches tolerance, and the humorist, with a smile and perhaps a sigh, is more likely to shrug his shoulders than to condemn.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Summing Up

Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 67

People , Smile

“It's the unreal, sustained glitch in naturalism that makes this genre of TV disturbing to either watch or be on. The Lynchian subjugation of our humanity; warmth and humour, usurped by a sterile, pastel-coloured steel blade benignly thrust again and again into a grey brain.”

Russell Brand (1975) British comedian, actor, and author

Russell Brand - The Guardian (2013)

Nature

“The people who fear humour — and they are many — are suspicious of its power to present things in unexpected lights, to question received opinions and to suggest unforeseen possibilities.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Opera and Humour (1991)

People , Fear , Question , Light

“"Discretion" means, when it is said that something is to be done within the discretion of the authorities that that something is to be done according to the rules of reason and justice, not according to private opinion2; according to law and not humour. It is to be not arbitrary, vague, and fanciful, but legal and regular. And it must be exercised within the limit, to which an honest man, competent to the discharge of his office, ought to confine himself.”

Hardinge Giffard, 1st Earl of Halsbury (1823–1921) British politician

Sharp v. Wakefield (1891), 64 L. T. Rep. 180 [1891], Ap. Ca. 173.

Justice , Law , Exercises

“Del Piero is known for his sense of humour. He once joked that if Lippi does not convoke him to the World Cup in Germany, he would "run him over with his car and sink his damn boat."”

Alessandro Del Piero (1974) Italian former professional footballer

Tiscali.it http://sport.tiscali.it/articoli/06/01/20/del_piero_fiorello.html
Attributed

World , Cars , Sense

“Writing is hard work. Even when you start with the raw ingredients – a mad family, a sense of humour, talent…it’s hard work. But you do get to sit around in silk pyjamas all day.”

Carole Morin British writer

Trivial and Profound (2013)

Family , Sense , Madness

“Comedy is in act superior to tragedy and humourous reasoning superior to grandiloquent reasoning.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

Attributed by Karl Marx in Comments on the North American Events http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/1862/10/12.html, Die Presse (12 October 1862)

“A man must have something to grumble about; and if he can’t complain that his wife harries him to death with her perversity and ill-humour, he must complain that she wears him out with her kindness and gentleness.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXXII : Comparisons: Information Rejected; Ralph to Milicent

Death

“In the last few years there has been a harvest of books and lectures about the "Mysterious Universe." The inconceivable magnitudes with which astronomy deals produce a sense of awe which lends itself to a poetic and philosophical treatment. "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy hands, the moon and the starts, whuch thou hast ordained: what is man that thou art mindful of him? The literary skill with which this branch of science has been exploited compels one's admiration, but alos, a little, one's sense of the ridiculous. For other facts than those of astronomy, oother disciplines than of mathematics, can produce the same lively feelings of awe and reverence: the extraordinary finenness of their adjustments to the world outside: the amazing faculties of the human mind, of which we know neither whence it comes not whither it goes. In some fortunate people this reverence is produced by the natural bauty of a landscape, by the majesty of an ancient building, by the heroism of a rescue party, by poetry, or by music. God is doubtless a Mathematician, but he is also a Physiologist, an Engineer, a Mother, an Architect, a Coal Miner, a Poet, and a Gardener. Each of us views things in his own peculiar war, each clothes the Creator in a manner which fits into his own scheme. My God, for instance, among his other professions, is an Inventor: I picture him inventing water, carbon dioxide, and haemoglobin, crabs, frogs, and cuttle fish, whales and filterpassing organisms ( in the ratio of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1 in size), and rejoicing greatly over these weird and ingenious things, just as I rejoice greatly over some simple bit of apparatus. But I would nor urge that God is only an Inventor: for inventors are apt, as those who know them realize, to be very dull dogs. Indeed, I should be inclined rather to imagine God to be like a University, with all its teachers and professors together: not omittin the students, for he obviously possesses, judging from his inventions, that noblest human characteristic, a sense of humour.”

Archibald Hill (1886–1977) English physiologist and biophysicist

The Ethical Dilemma of Science and Other Writings https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=zaE1AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false (1960, Cap 1. Scepticism and Faith, p. 41)

God , War , People , Books

“What is it that is done to our children that their puberty should deform them? They have the joy of movement; they have an enterprising curiosity; they are ready for sensible self-denial; they dream ahead, and they have a faithful memory, and, above all, great compassion. […] The well-meaning educator who flatters and humours the young not only does a disservice to the community, but also damages the individual by depriving him of the opportunities of self-discovery.”

Kurt Hahn (1886–1974) German educator

Quoted by Donald McLachlan in Kurt Hahn: A Life Span in Education and Politics, ed. Herman Röhrs, 1966, tr. 1970, ISBN 0710068859, §1, p. 8.

Children , Education , Faith , Dreams