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One never needs their humor as much a when they argue with a fool.
-Chinese Proverb
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Many a true word is spoken in jest.
-English Proverb
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A poor joke must invent its own laughter.
-Proverb
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If I have not seen as far as others, it is because there were giants standing on my shoulders.
-Harold Abelson
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I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.
-Edward Albee
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My life has been one great big joke, a dance that's walked a song that's spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.
-Maya Angelou
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The secret to humor is surprise.
-Aristotle
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Melancholy men are of all others the most witty.
-Aristotle
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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.
-W. H. Auden
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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.
-Francis Bacon
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A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs-jolted by every pebble in the road.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a joke.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Wit. The salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.
-Ambrose Bierce
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We never respect those who amuse us, however we may smile at their comic powers.
-Marguerite Blessington
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Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It's unbridled, its unplanned, it's full of suprises.
-Erma Bombeck
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We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
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Humor is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.
-Victor Borge
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For my own part I think no innocent species of wit or pleasantry should be suppressed: and that a good pun may be admitted among the smaller excellencies of lively conversation.
-James Boswell
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Being a funny person does an awful lot of things to you. You feel that you mustn't get serious with people. They don't expect it from you, and they don't want to see it. You're not entitled to be serious, you're a clown, and they only want you to make them laugh.
-Fanny Brice
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A rich man's joke is always funny.
-Thomas Edward Brown
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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.
-Lenny Bruce
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The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.
-Lenny Bruce
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Jesting is often only indigence of intellect.
-Jean De La Bruyere
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To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.
-Gelett Burgess
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Comedy is a tragedy plus time.
-Carol Burnett
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Someone who makes you laugh is a comedian. Someone who makes you think and then laugh is a humorist.
-George Burns
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I have a suggestion that I think would help fight serious crime. Signs. There are lots of signs for minor infractions: No Smoking, Stay Off the Grass, Keep Out, and they seem to work fairly well. I think we should also have signs for major crimes: Murder Strictly Prohibited, NO Raping People, Thank You for Not Kidnapping Anyone. It's certainly worth a try. I'm convinced Watergate would never have happened if there had just been a sign in the Oval Office that said, Malfeasance of Office Is Strictly Against the Law, or Thank You for Not Undermining the Constitution.
-George Carlin
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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.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Humore is an affirmation of man's dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.
-Romain Cary
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Jests that give pains are no jests.
-Miguel de Cervantes
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In the end, everything is a gag.
-Charlie Chaplin
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I remain just one thing, and one thing only -- and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.
-Charlie Chaplin
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The banalities of a great man pass for wit.
-Alexander Chase
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Wit is so shining a quality that everybody admires it; most people aim at it, all people fear it, and few love it unless in themselves. A man must have a good share of wit himself to endure a great share of it in another.
-Lord Chesterfield
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A wise man will live as much within his wit as within his income.
-Lord Chesterfield
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The old idea that the joke was not good enough for the company has been superseded by the new aristocratic idea that the company was not worthy of the joke. They have introduced an almost insane individualism into that one form of intercourse which is specially and uproariously communal. They have made even levities into secrets. They have made laughter lonelier than tears.
-G. K. Chesterton
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Great use they have, when in the hands
Of one like me, who understands,
Who understands the time and place,
The person, manner, and the grace,
Which fools neglect; so that we find,
If all the requisites are join'd,
From whence a perfect joke must spring,
A joke's a very serious thing.
-Charles Churchill, The Ghost (book IV, lines 1379-1387), 1762
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Well, dinner would have been splendid
-Sir Winston Churchill
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Prithee don't screw your wit beyond the compass of good manners.
-Colley Cibber
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Humor is always based on a modicum of truth. Have you ever heard a joke about a father-in-law.
-Dick Clark
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Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humor?
-Frank Moore Colby
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People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Humor is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Levity is often less foolish and gravity less wise than each of them appears.
-Charles Caleb Colton
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A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.
-Joseph Conrad
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You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything - even poverty - you can survive it.
-Bill Cosby
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Wit ought to be a glorious treat like caviar; never spread it about like marmalade.
-Noel Coward
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A man renowned for repartee will seldom scruple to make free with friendship's finest feeling, will thrust a dagger at your breast, and say he wounded you in jest, by way of balm for healing.
-William Cowper
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In polite society one laughs at all the jokes, including the ones one has heard before.
-Frank Dane
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The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.
-Robertson Davies
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Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.
-Edward de Bono
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A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket.
-John Dennis
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Burt Reynolds once asked me out. I was in his room.
-Phyllis Diller
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The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.
-Umberto Eco
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A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
-George Eliot
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People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.
-George Eliot
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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.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Humor is not a postscript or an incidental afterthought; it is a serious and weighty part of the world's economy. One feels increasingly the height of the faculty in which it arises, the nobility of things associated with it, and the greatness of services it renders.
-Oscar W. Firkins, Oscar Firkins: Memoirs and Letters
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A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.
-Fredrich
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If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.
-Mahatma Gandhi
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Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.
-Roman Gary
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His hilarity was like a scream from a crevasse.
-Graham Greene
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Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.
-Vaclav Havel
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Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.
-William Hazlitt
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Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
-William Hazlitt
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They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.
-Ernest Hemingway
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A humorist is a person who feels bad, but who feels good about it.
-Don Herold
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I try to offset any tendency towards the macabre with humour. As I see it, this is a typically English form of humour. It's a piece with such jokes as the one about the man who was being led to the gallows to be hanged. He looked at the trap door in the gallows, which was flimsily constructed, and he asked in some alarm, 'I say, is that thing safe?'
-Alfred Hitchcock
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A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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A jest often decides matters of importance more effectual and happily than seriousness.
-Horace
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Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.
-Langston Hughes
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I am a great friend to public amusements, for they keep the people from vice.
-Samuel Johnson
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I gleaned jests at home from obsolete farces.
-Samuel Johnson
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He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.
-Samuel Johnson
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There is always some frivolity in excellent minds; they have wings to rise, but also stray.
-Joseph Joubert
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An Irishman needs three things : silence, cunnning, and exile.
-James Joyce
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Be not affronted at a joke. If one throw salt at thee, thou wilt receive no harm, unless thou art raw.
-Junius
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WARNING: Humor may be hazardous to your illness.
-Ellie Katz
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Humor, a good sense of it, is to Americans what manhood is to Spaniards and we will go to great lengths to prove it. Experiments with laboratory rats have shown that, if one psychologist in the room laughs at something a rat does, all of the other psychologists in the room will laugh equally. Nobody wants to be left holding the joke.
-Garrison Keillor
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The funniest line in English is Get it? When you say that, everyone chortles.
-Garrison Keillor
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The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.
-Florence King
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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.
-Florence King
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The problem with those bumper stickers that warn against tailgating, is that I have to get really close to the person's car to read them.
-John Alejandro King, The Covert Comic
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The man who said in 1899: Everything that can be invented has been invented - technically, wasn't he right at the time?
-John Alejandro King, The Covert Comic
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Remember, anyone can juggle for a second.
-John Alejandro King
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What makes you think the whole world revolves around you?! my mother said, as I slowly rotated to maintain eye contact.
-John Alejandro King
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The hall-mark of American humor is its pose of illiteracy.
-Ronald Knox
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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.
-Jean De La Bruyere
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A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.
-Charles Lamb
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Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.
-Stephen Leacock
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But the deep background that lies behind and beyond what we call humor is revealed only to the few who, by instinct or by effort, have given thought to it. The world's humor, in its best and greatest sense, is perhaps the highest product of our civilization. Its basis lies in the deeper contrasts offered by life itself: the strange incongruity between our aspiration and our achievement, the eager and fretful anxieties of today that fade into nothingness tomorrow, the burning pain and the sharp sorrow that are softened in the gentle retrospect of time, till as we look back upon the course that has been traversed, we pass in view the panorama of our lives, as people in old age may recall, with mingled tears and smiles, the angry quarrels of their childhood. And here, in its larger aspect, humor is blended with pathos till the two are one, and represent, as they have in every age, the mingled heritage of tears and laughter that is our lot on earth.
-Stephen Leacock
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Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you, if you
-John Lennon, Royal Variety Performance, London, quoted in John Winston Lennon, pt. 1, ch. 11, R. Colman (1984)
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If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Judge of a jest when you have done laughing.
-William Lloyd
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In the midst of the fountain of wit there arises something bitter, which stings in the very flowers.
-Lucretius
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A person who knows how to laugh at himself will never ceased to be amused.
-Shirley Maclaine
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Avoid witicisms at the expense of others.
-Horace Mann
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Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.
-Steve Martin
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Comedy may be big business but it isn't pretty.
-Steve Martin
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If you've heard this story before, don't stop me, because I'd like to hear it again.
-Groucho Marx
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It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humor.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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To be witty is not enough. One must possess sufficient wit to avoid having too much of it.
-Andr
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Jokes are grievances.
-Marshall McLuhan
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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.
-Christopher Morley, Inward Ho
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Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.
-Malcolm Muggeridge
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Wit is a weapon. Jokes are a masculine way of inflicting superiority. But humor is the pursuit of a gentle grin, usually in solitude.
-Frank Muir
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I could not tread these perilous paths in safety, if I did not keep a saving sense of humor.
-Lord Nelson
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Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Wit is brushwood; judgment timber; the one gives the greatest flame, and the other yields the most durable heat; and both meeting make the best fire.
-Overlung
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Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
-Dorothy Parker
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There's a helluva distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
-Dorothy Parker
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Brevity is the body and soul of wit.
-Jean Paul
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Witticisms please as long as we keep them within boundaries, but pushed to excess they cause offense.
-Phaedrus
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Even the gods love jokes.
-Plato
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True wit is nature to advantage dressed, what oft was thought, but never so well expressed.
-Alexander Pope
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Wit is the lowest form of humor.
-Alexander Pope, "Essay on Criticism"
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There are things of deadly earnest that can only be mentioned under the cover of a joke.
-J. J. Procter
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The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh
-Carl Reiner
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Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.
-Agnes Repplier, Points of View
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The happiness or unhappiness of men depends as much on their humors as on fortune.
-Fran
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Fortune and humor govern the world.
-Fran
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Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else.
-Will Rogers
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There's no trick to being humorous when you have the whole government working for you.
-Will Rogers
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Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.
-Leo Rosten
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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
-Leo Rosten
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Anyone without a sense of humor is at the mercy of everyone else.
-William E. Rothschild
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Humor has been a fashioning instrument in America, cleaving its way through the national life, holding tenaciously to the spread elements of that life. Its mode has often been swift and coarse and ruthless, beyond art and beyond established civilization. It has engaged in warfare against the established heritage, against the bonds of pioneer existence. Its objective --the unconscious objective of a disunited people --has seemed to be that of creating fresh bonds, a new unity, the semblance of a society and the rounded completion of an American type.
-Constance Rourke
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An emotional man may possess no humor, but a humorous man usually has deep pockets of emotion, sometimes tucked away or forgotten.
-Constance Rourke
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He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony.
-Rafael Sabatini
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The jest loses its point when he who makes it is the first to laugh.
-Friedrich von Schiller
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Good humor isn't a trait of character, it is an art which requires practice.
-David Seabury
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Comedy is the last refuge of the nonconformist mind.
-Gilbert Seldes
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It is the saying of an ancient sage that humor was the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor.
-Lord Shaftesbury
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He jests at scars that never felt a wound.
-William Shakespeare
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Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. Where be your jibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?
-William Shakespeare
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He's winding up the watch of his wit. By and by it will strike.
-William Shakespeare
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My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?
-George Bernard Shaw
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The right honorable gentlemen is indebted to his memory for his jokes and his imagination for his facts.
-Richard Brinsley Sheridan
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Be simple in words, manners, and gestures. Amuse as well as instruct. If you can make a man laugh, you can make him think and make him like and believe you.
-Alfred E. Smith
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The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.
-Socrates
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Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.
-Stephen Sondheim
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Wit lies in recognizing the resemblance among things which differ and the difference between things which are alike.
-Germaine De Stael
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For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.
-Laurence Sterne
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'Tis no extravagant arithmetic to say, that for every ten jokes, thou hast got an hundred enemies; and till thou hast gone on, and raised a swarm of wasps about thine ears, and art half stung to death by them, thou wilt never be convinced it is so.
-Laurence Sterne
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A brilliant epigram is a solemn platitude gone to a masquerade ball.
-Lionel Strachey
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What some people invent the rest enlarge.
-Jonathan Swift
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All human race would be wits. And millions miss, for one that hits.
-Jonathan Swift
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By blood a king, in heart a clown.
-Alfred Lord Tennyson
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As a person is so must you humor them.
-Terence
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Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.
-Henry David Thoreau
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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.
-James Thurber
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Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, innuendo, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit, but unlike the French and the English, we have not been much good at wit since the days of Benjamin Franklin.
-James Thurber
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Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
-James Thurber
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Never say a humorous thing to a man who does not possess humor. He will always use it in evidence against you.
-Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree
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Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.
-Lionel Trilling
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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.
-Harry S Truman
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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.
-Mark Twain
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Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.
-Mark Twain
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Wit and Humor -- if any difference, it is in duration -- lightning and electric light. Same material, apparently; but one is vivid, and can do damage -- the other fools along and enjoys elaboration.
-Mark Twain
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Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
-Mark Twain, Following the Equator-A Journey Around the World, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
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Humor -- the perfect relationship of the parts to the whole.
-Source Unknown
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Humor is a whisper from the soul, imploring mind and body to relax, let go and be at peace again.
-Source Unknown
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Isn't it sad how some people can't be funny, so they have to settle for being obnoxious?
-Source Unknown
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Our five senses are incomplete without the sixth -- a sense of humor.
-Source Unknown
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The average man is proof enough that a woman can take a joke.
-Source Unknown
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Wit is more often a shield than a lance.
-Source Unknown
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Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
-Peter Ustinov
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Wit is the only wall between us and the dark.
-Mark Van Doren
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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.
-Horace Walpole
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A well-developed sense of humor is the pole that adds balance to your step as you walk the tightrope of life.
-William Arthur Ward
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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?
-Andy Warhol
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It's hard to be funny when you have to be clean.
-Mae West
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Where ever you find humor, you find pathos close by it side.
-Edwin P. Whipple
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Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White, Some Remarks on Humor (introduction)
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Times change. The farmer's daughter now tells jokes about the traveling salesman.
-Carey Williams
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If you can make a woman laugh you can do anything with her.
-Nicol Williamson
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Get well cards have become so humorous that if you don't get sick you're missing half the fun.
-Flip Wilson
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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.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.
-Lin Yutang
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Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.
-Johann Georg Zimmermann
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Books about Humor
