Humour: Quotations About This Subject



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When it comes to taking chances, some people like to play poker or shoot dice; other people prefer to parachute jump, go rhino hunting, or climb ice floes, while still others engage in crime or marriage. But I like to get drunk and drive like a fool. Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you're half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose, and a teen-age lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you're going a hundred miles an hour down a suburban sidestreet. You'd have to watch the entire Mexican air force crash-land in a liquid petroleum gas storage facility to match this kind of thrill. If you ever have much more fun than that, you'll die of pure sensory overload, I'm here to tell you.

x Author:: P. J. O'Rourke

x Source:: How to drive fast on drugs while getting your wing-wang squeezed and not spill your drink

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The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

x Author:: Mark Twain

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A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

x Author:: Joseph Conrad

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Humor is, I think, the sublets and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers

x Author:: Leo Rosten

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True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

x Author:: Thomas Carlyle

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Levity is often less foolish and gravity less wise than each of them appears.

x Author:: Charles Caleb Colton

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In the end, everything is a gag.

x Author:: Charlie Chaplin

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

x Author:: Malcolm Muggeridge

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One should never risk a joke, even of the mildest and most unexceptional charters, except among people of culture and wit.

x Author:: Jean de La Bruyère

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Imagination was given man to compensate for what he is not, and a sense of humor to console him for what he is.

x Author:: Francis Bacon

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Any man who has had the job I've had and didn't have a sense of humor wouldn't still be here.

x Author:: Harry S. Truman

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I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell?

x Author:: Andy Warhol

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Humor -- the perfect relationship of the parts to the whole.

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Fortune and humor govern the world.

x Author:: François de La Rochefoucauld

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Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.

x Author:: Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

x Author:: George Eliot

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If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.

x Author:: Abraham Lincoln

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There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.

x Author:: Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.

x Author:: Lenny Bruce

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A poor joke must invent its own laughter.

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x Source:: Latin Proverb

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Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.

x Author:: Lionel Trilling

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The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.

x Author:: Socrates

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Our five senses are incomplete without the sixth -- a sense of humor.

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Good humor isn't a trait of character, it is an art which requires practice.

x Author:: David Seabury

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Isn't it sad how some people can't be funny, so they have to settle for being obnoxious?

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There is always some frivolity in excellent minds; they have wings to rise, but also stray.

x Author:: Joseph Joubert

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

x Author:: Mahatma Gandhi

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A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs-jolted by every pebble in the road.

x Author:: Henry Ward Beecher

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As a person is so must you humor them.

x Author:: Terence

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The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people --that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.

x Author:: James Thurber

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The right honorable gentlemen is indebted to his memory for his jokes and his imagination for his facts.

x Author:: Richard Brinsley Sheridan

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People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.

x Author:: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.

x Author:: Laurence Sterne

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Humor is a whisper from the soul, imploring mind and body to relax, let go and be at peace again.

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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.

x Author:: W. H. Auden

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Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

x Author:: James Thurber

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

x Author:: Don Herold

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The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

x Author:: Umberto Eco

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It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humor.

x Author:: W. Somerset Maugham

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I am a great friend to public amusements, for they keep the people from vice.

x Author:: Samuel Johnson

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Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

x Author:: Peter Ustinov

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What some people invent the rest enlarge.

x Author:: Jonathan Swift

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

x Author:: Will Rogers

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Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

x Author:: Mark Twain

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One never needs their humor as much a when they argue with a fool.

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x Source:: Chinese proverb

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Any discussion of the problems of being funny in America will not make sense unless we substitute the word wit for humor. Humor inspires sympathetic good-natured laughter and is favored by the healing-power gang. Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down.

x Author:: Florence King

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The happiness or unhappiness of men depends as much on their humors as on fortune.

x Author:: François de La Rochefoucauld

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Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

x Author:: Leo Rosten

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We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

x Author:: Napoleon Bonaparte

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All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.

x Author:: Lenny Bruce

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A jest often decides matters of importance more effectual and happily than seriousness.

x Author:: Horace

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An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.

x Author:: Washington Irving

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The secret to humor is surprise.

x Author:: Aristotle

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

x Author:: William Makepeace Thackeray

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

x Author:: Mae West

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Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.

x Author:: Joseph Addison

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Even the gods love jokes.

x Author:: Plato

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By blood a king, in heart a clown.

x Author:: Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson

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