This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The sense of humor is the oil of life's engine. Without it, the machinery creaks and groans. No lot is so hard, no aspect of things is so grim, but it relaxes before a hearty laugh.
Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Business | Humor | Mind | Serenity | Business |
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.
Transcendence restores humor. Spirit restores humor. Suddenly, smiling returns. Too many representatives of too many movements - even many very good movements, such as feminism, environmentalism, meditation, spiritual studies - seem to lack humor altogether. In other words, they lack lightness, they lack a distance from themselves, a distance from the ego and its grim game of forcing others to conform to its contours.
Human dignity... consists of four characteristics of the scamp . . . They are: a playful curiosity, a capacity for dreams, a sense of humor to correct those dreams, and finally a certain waywardness and incalculability of behavior.
Complaisance pleases all; prejudices none; adorns wit; renders humor agreeable; augments friendship; redoubles love; and united with justice and generosity, becomes the secret chain of the society of mankind.
Laughter without a tinge of philosophy is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.
Humor | Philosophy |
A sense of humor is a major defense against minor troubles.
Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you’re sneaky, all the ways that you hide out, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all of that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you’re coming to know humanness altogether. We are all up against these things. We are all in this together.
Wit penetrates; humor envelops. Wit is a function of verbal intelligence; humor is imagination operating on good nature.
Good | Humor | Imagination | Wit |
I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humor and English wine.
I am content in my later years. I have kept my good humor and take neither myself nor the next person seriously.
I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense… Schopenhauer’s saying, ‘A man can do what he wants, but not will what he wants,’ has been a very real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’, and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance. This realization mercifully mitigates the easily paralyzing sense of responsibility and prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it is conducive to a view of life which, in part, gives humor its due.
Consolation | Freedom | Humor | Inspiration | Life | Life | Man | People | Responsibility | Sense | Will |
The intimate relation between humor and faith is derived from the fact that both deal with the incongruities of our existence. Humor is concerned with the immediate incongruities of life and faith with ultimate ones. Both humor and faith are the expressions of the freedom of the human spirit, of its capacity to stand outside of life, and itself, and view the whole scene. But any view of the whole immediately creates the problem of how the incongruities of life are to be dealt with; for the effort to understand the life, and our place in it, confronts us with inconsistencies and incongruities which do not fit into any neat picture of the whole. Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially. Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence which threaten the very meaning of our life.
Capacity | Effort | Existence | Faith | Freedom | Humor | Laughter | Life | Life | Meaning | Understand |
I have never consciously used humor in my life. Such humor as I may have is one of the elements in which I live. I cannot recall a time when I was not conscious of the deep, heaving, rolling ocean of hilarity that lies so very near the surface of life in most of its aspects. If I am a moralist
Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.
Humor |
The search for the sense of humor 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.