Humor Quotes

A good sense of humor is a survival skill. These quotes celebrate wit, comedy, sarcasm, and the ability to find something funny in situations that might otherwise be unbearable. Laughter, it turns out, is a form of intelligence.

“It has always surprised me how little attention philosophers have paid to humor, since it is a more significant process of mind than reason. Reason can only sort out perceptions, but the humor process is involved in changing them.”

Edward de Bono

More Humor Quotes

“Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.”

Mark Twain

“Humor expands our limited picture frame and gets us to see more than just our problem.”

Allen Klein

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

Mark Twain

“Well, darkness with humor... I'm not an extremely suicidal or sad person.”

Peter Steele

“Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.”

J. G. Ballard

“Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom - it doesn't have the same factory machinery up and running, teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations - but that doesn't explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective.”

James Wolcott

“The darker the film, the more vital everyone's sense of humor is on set.”

Eric Bana

“The guys in my band are great-we watch movies, we eat pizza, take walks, read books. Everybody has a really great sense of humor. And my boyfriend comes and visits me on the road.”

Lisa Loeb

“My father could be very witty, even if the humor was always on the darker side of irony.”

Maurice Sendak

“Athletes tend to have less of a sense of humor than most people. They are heroes to so many. That might be part of it.”

Jeff Ross

“Humor does not rescue us from unhappiness, but enables us to move back from it a little.”

Mason Cooley

“Whether it's viewers of the show or readers of my columns and books, I'm consistently impressed with their wit, humor and insight. That goes for about 95 percent of the audience. The other five percent are why the 'Delete' option and restraining orders were invented.”

Richard Roeper

“You can't do anything to be funny. That's cringeworthy. If your humor comes out of a place of love every time, you don't make the joke bigger than you. The funniest comedians are in touch with their emotional level.”

John Krasinski

“My books are shelved in different places, depending on the bookstore. Sometimes they can be found in the Mystery section, sometimes in the Humor department, and occasionally even in the Literature aisle, which is somewhat astounding.”

Carl Hiaasen

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