This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Good-humor makes all things tolerable." - Henry Ward Beecher
"A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs; jolted by every pebble in the road." - Henry Ward Beecher
"A sense of humor is a sense of proportion." - Kahlil Gibran
"We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life." - Martha Graham
"To live is not just to survive, but to thrive with passion, compassion, some humor and style." - Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
"All humor, basically, is based on conflict." - Norman Lear, fully Norman Milton Lear
"Humor is a critical ingredient of all truth seeking, even in the most powerful rituals because... humor balances gravity." - Apela Colorado, aka Pamela Colorado
"In humor, there is truth. We need to take humor more seriously." - Ralph Nader
"Humor is a prelude to faith and laughter is the beginning of prayer." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
"No man with any sense of humor ever founded a religion." - Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
"Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion." - Thomas Browne, fully Sir Thomas Browne
"The first ingredient in conversation is truth; the next, good sense; the third, good humor; and the fourth, wit." - William Temple, fully Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet
"The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense, the third good humor, and the fourth with." - William Temple, fully Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet
"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. It is a sort of inverse sublimity, exalting as it were, into our affections what is below us, while sublimity draws down into our affections what is above us." - Thomas Carlyle
"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
"There is no greater every-day virtue than cheerfulness. This quality in man among men is like sunshine to the day or gentle renewing moisture to parched herbs. The light of a cheerful face diffuses itself, and communicates the happy spirit that inspires it. The sourest temper must sweeten in the atmosphere of continuous good humor." - Thomas Carlyle
"The essence of humor is sensibility; warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence." - Thomas Carlyle
"Make not a bosom friend of a melancholy soul: he'll be sure to aggravate thy adversity, and lessen thy prosperity. He goes always heavy loaded; and thou must bear half. He's never in a good humor; and may easily get into a bad one, and fall out with thee." - Thomas Fuller
"Make not a bosom friend of a melancholy soul; he will be sure to aggravate thy adversity, and lessen your prosperity. He goes always heavy loaded; and thou must bear half. He is never in a good humor; and may easily get into a bad one, and fall out with thee." - Thomas Fuller
"You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches them tolerance." - W. Somerset Maugham, fully William Somerset Maugham
"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
"To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning, by study; and studies themselves, do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience." - Francis Bacon
"It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment. " - Freeman John Dyson
"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." - George S. Merriam
"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. " - Grenville Kleiser
"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, 4th Earl of Oxford
"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." - Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
"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. " - Lin Yutang
"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." - Madeleine Scuderi, also Madeleine de Scudéry, aka Sapho
"Laughter without a tinge of philosophy is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom." - Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
"A sense of humor is a major defense against minor troubles." - Mignon McLaughlin
"Wit penetrates; humor envelops. Wit is a function of verbal intelligence; humor is imagination operating on good nature. " - Peggy Noonan, born Margaret Ellen Noonan
"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." - Pema Chödrön, born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown
"I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humor and English wine. " - Peter Ustinov, fully Sir Peter Alexander Ustinov
"I am content in my later years. I have kept my good humor and take neither myself nor the next person seriously. " - Albert Einstein
"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. " - Albert Einstein
"Politeness is nothing more than an elegant and concealed species of flattery, tending to put the person to whom it is addressed in good humor and respect with himself." - Richard Cumberland, Bishop of Peterborough
"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." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
"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 " - Robertson Davies
"The people who fear humor - and they are many - are suspicious of its power to present things in unexpected lights, to question received opinions and to suggest unforeseen possibilities." - Robertson Davies
"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." - Robertson Davies
"Maybe there's a chance to get back to grown-up films. Anything that uses humor and dramatic values to deal with human emotions and gets down to what people are to people." - Robert Altman, fully Robert Bernard Altman
"Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people." - Robert Benchley, fully Robert Charles Benchley
"Melancholy advanceth men's conceits more than shy humor whatever." - Robert Burton
"Buy a pup and your money will buy Love unflinching that cannot lie." - Rudyard Kipling
"A skillful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war." - Samuel Butler
"Good men must be affectionate men." - Samuel Richardson
"Now I have no regrets, because things that do not exist for me, I think they are absolutely not." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
"Providence would seem to sleep unless faith and prayer awaken it. The disciples had but little faith in their Master's accounts, yet that little faith awakened him in a storm, and he relieved them. Unbelief doth only discourage God from showing his power in taking our parts." - Stephen Charnock