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Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.Virginia Woolf
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The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.John Updike
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The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.Charles Lamb
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He that jokes confesses.Italian Proverb
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There are things of deadly earnest that can only be safely mentioned under cover of a joke.J. J. Procter
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Humour is the only test of gravity and gravity of humour for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.Aristotle
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A satirist is a man who discovers unpleasant things about himself and then says them about other people.Peter McArthur
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Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.James Thurber
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The best definition of humour I know is: humour may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life and the artistic expression thereof. I think this is the best I know because I wrote it myself.Stephen Leacock
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A humorist is a man who feels bad but who feels good about it.Don Herold
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Humour plays close to the big hot fire which is the truth and the reader feels the heat.E. B. White
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Wit is the only wall Between us and the dark.Mark Van Doren
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Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So for every ten Jews beating their breasts God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.Mel Brooks
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Mirthfulness is in the mind and you cannot get it out. It is just as good in its place as conscience or veneration.Henry Ward Beecher
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Novelist Peter de Vries like Adlai Stevenson and Mark Twain has suffered from the American assumption that anyone with a sense of humour is not to be taken seriously.Timothy Foote
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Humour can be dissected as a frog can but the thing dies in the process.E. B. White
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Humour is the contemplation of the finite from the point of view of the infinite.Christian Morgenstern
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The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.Alfred North Whitehead
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Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.Karl Barth
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Humour is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention. But it has no persuasive value at all.J. K. Galbraith
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Humour is the most engaging cowardice. With it myself I have been able to hold some of my enemy in play far out of gunshot.Robert Frost
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A comedian is a fellow who finds other comedians too humorous to mention.Jack Herbert
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If it's sanity you're after There's no recipe like Laughter. Laugh it off.Henry Rutherford Elliot
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Humour is an affirmation of dignity a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.Romain Gary
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Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.Peter Ustinov
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Comedy is tragedy - plus time.Carol Burnett
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Caricature: putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.Joseph Conrad
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The ability to laugh at life is right at the top with love and communication in the hierarchy of our needs. Humour has much to do with pain it exaggerates the anxieties and absurdities we feel so that we gain distance and through laughter relief.Sara Davidson
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He deserves paradise who makes his companions laugh.The Koran
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You encourage a comic man too much and he gets silly.Stephen Leacock
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Any man will admit if need be that his sight is not good or that he cannot swim or shoots badly with a rifle but to touch upon his sense of humour is to give him mortal affront.Stephen Leacock
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Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.Charles Lamb
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Wit is far more often a shield than a lance.Anonymous
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If there's anything I hate it's the word humorist - I feel like countering with the word seriousist.Peter De Vries
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A jest's prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it never in the tongue Of him that makes it.William Shakespeare
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Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.Aldous Huxley
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Humour is just another defence against the universe.Mel Brooks
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The great humorist forgets himself in his delighted contemplation of other people.Douglas Bush
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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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Laughter is the sensation of feeling good all over and showing it principally in one spot.Josh Billings
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We are all here for a spell get all the good laughs you can.Will Rogers
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No one is more profoundly sad than he who laughs too much.Jean Paul Richter
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One loses so many laughs by not laughing at oneself.Sara Jeannette Duncan
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You can pretend to be serious but you can't pretend to be witty.Sacha Guitry
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Charles Dickens' creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say it in all seriousness - than Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.Stephen Leacock
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The love of truth lies at the root of much humour.Robertson Davies