Jealousy is always born with love but does not always die with it.
François de La Rochefoucauld
1. "A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a pebble in the hand of a fool."
Joseph Roux
Other categories: Wisdom and Stupidity
2. "Wit is the epitaph of an emotion."
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
3. "Good taste and humour are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore."
Malcolm Muggeridge
4. "Satire is a lesson, parody is a game."
Vladimir Nabokov
5. "Wit is educated insolence."
Aristotle, "The Art of Rhetoric"
Other categories: Education
6. "Never joke at funerals, or during business transactions."
Herman Melville, "Israel Potter"
7. "France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams."
Thomas Carlyle, "History of the French Revolution"
Other categories: Authority, Government -:- History and Nations
8. "One doesn't have a sense of humor. It has you."
Larry Gelbart
9. "A new gadget that lasts only five minutes is worth more than an immortal work that bores everyone."
Francis Picabia
Other categories: Various
10. "A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion."
George Orwell, "Collected Essays"
Other categories: Manners and Ethics
11. "Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and their politicians as jokes."
Will Rogers
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
12. "Woman! The peg on which the wit hangs his jest, the preacher his text, the cynic his grouch, and the sinner his justification!"
Helen Rowland, "A Guide to Men"
Other categories: Sin and Conscience -:- Woman and Man
13. "The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself."
James Thurber
14. "Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it."
E. B. White
15. "She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit."
William Somerset Maugham
16. "As many heads as many wits."
Scottish proverb
Other categories: Wisdom and Stupidity
17. "Life is too important to be taken as a joke, but too ridiculous to be taken seriously."
Ashleigh Brilliant
Other categories: Life and Death
18. "Proverb - a definition ... The wisdom of many and the wit of one."
John Russell, 1st Earl Russell
Other categories: Various -:- Wisdom and Stupidity
19. "Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost."
James Thurber
20. "Humor is just another defense against the universe."
Mel Brooks
21. "A comedian does funny things. A good comedian does things funny."
Buster Keaton
22. "Wit lies in recognizing the resemblance among things which differ and the difference between things which are alike."
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein
23. "Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them."
Niels Bohr
Other categories: Various
24. "Many people are surprised to hear that we have comedians in Russia, but they are there. They are dead, but they are there."
Yakov Smirnoff
25. "Humour is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him."
Romain Gary
26. "The gods too are fond of a joke."
Aristotle
27. "Our five senses are incomplete without the sixth - a sense of humor."
(?)
28. "Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he isn't; and a sense of humour to console him for what he is."
Horace Walpole
Other categories: Reality and Imagination
29. "One matter Englishmen don't think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humour."
Marshall McLuhan
Other categories: History and Nations
30. "The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth."
George Jean Nathan
31. "All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl."
Charlie Chaplin, "My Autobiography"
32. "A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference and a longer view and finds them incongruous. It dampens enthusiasm; it mocks hope; it pardons shortcomings; it consoles failure. It recommends moderation."
Thornton Wilder, "The Eighth Day"
33. "The most perfect humour and irony is generally quite unconscious."
Samuel Butler, "Life and Habit"
34. "If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think."
Clarence Darrow
Other categories: Power and Weakness
35. "Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one."
Oscar Wilde
Other categories: Friendship and Hostility
36. "Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke."
Steve Martin
Other categories: Art and Culture
37. "Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."
George Bernard Shaw, "The Doctor's Dilemma"
Other categories: Joy and Sadness -:- Life and Death
38. "The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow."
Herbert George Wells
Other categories: Time and Passing
39. "A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents."
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
40. "We must laugh before we are happy, for fear we die before we laugh at all."
Jean de La Bruyere
Other categories: Life and Death
41. "Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food."
William Hazlitt
42. "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"
Other categories: Sorrow and Nostalgia
43. "Cynicism is humour in ill health."
Herbert George Wells
44. "I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts."
Will Rogers
Other categories: Authority, Government
45. "My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world."
George Bernard Shaw
Other categories: Truth and Falsity
2007, collected and compiled by Kazimierz Matan
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