53 Funny Quotes to Brighten Your Day

Looking for funny quotes to share or drop into a caption? Here are 53 of them, grouped into six themes: witty wisdom, life's little ironies, work and procrastination, movie lines, everyday one-liners, and sourced gems from real comedians. Where a line is genuinely traceable, the source is named. Where a famous name gets pinned to a quote with no real source, it is marked Author unknown instead.

That last part is the difference. A lot of these jokes float around the internet stapled to whichever comedian feels right. We checked the ones we could and stopped guessing on the rest.

Witty wisdom

These are the lines that make you think before they make you laugh. The Wilde ones are real and sourced. The rest are funnier than they are traceable.

1. "I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying." — Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)
2. "I can resist everything except temptation." — Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)
3. "Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way you're a mile away and you have their shoes." — Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts
4. "If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito." — Author unknown
5. "I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure." — Author unknown
6. "If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving definitely isn't for you." — Author unknown
7. "Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes." — Author unknown
8. "Why do they call it rush hour when nothing moves?" — Author unknown
9. "To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone." — Reba McEntire, Comfort from a Country Quilt (1999)

The Wilde lines are worth a note. The first is spoken by a character, the Remarkable Rocket, in his 1888 story collection, so it is his writing rather than a personal aphorism. The second is straight from his 1892 play. Both hold up.

Life's little ironies

The everyday absurdities, said better than we'd say them ourselves.

1. "I'm not arguing, I'm just explaining why I'm right." — Author unknown
2. "Common sense is like deodorant. The people who need it most never use it." — Author unknown
3. "You can't have everything. Where would you put it?" — commonly attributed to Steven Wright
4. "My wallet is like an onion. Opening it makes me cry." — Author unknown
5. "I'm on a whiskey diet. I've lost three days already." — commonly attributed to Tommy Cooper
6. "The early bird might get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese." — Author unknown
7. "Some people graduate with honors, I am just honored to graduate." — Author unknown
8. "Life is short. Smile while you still have teeth." — Author unknown

The whiskey line is a staple of Tommy Cooper's stage act, so the credit is fair, but there is no clean primary source for the exact wording. The "second mouse" line gets pinned to Steven Wright everywhere, yet its real origin is murky, so it sits under Author unknown here.

Work, laziness and procrastination

The patron saints of putting it off until tomorrow.

1. "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." — Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
2. "Doing nothing is hard, you never know when you're done." — Author unknown
3. "My boss told me to have a good day, so I went home." — Author unknown
4. "I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early." — Author unknown
5. "Procrastinate now, don't put it off." — Author unknown
6. "I'm great at multitasking. I can waste time, be unproductive, and procrastinate all at once." — Author unknown
7. "Work is the greatest thing in the world. So we should always save some of it for tomorrow." — Author unknown
8. "If hard work is the key to success, most people would rather pick the lock." — Author unknown
9. "Teamwork is important. It helps to blame someone else." — Author unknown

The Douglas Adams line is the only one in this group with a real source, and it is a good one. It appears in The Salmon of Doubt, the collection published a year after his death.

Movie and pop-culture lines

These are character lines, which is why the attribution names the film, not the actor.

1. "I'm not superstitious, but I am a little stitious." — Michael Scott, The Office
2. "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." — Ferris Bueller, Ferris Bueller's Day Off
3. "It's just a flesh wound." — Monty Python and the Holy Grail
4. "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." — Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride
5. "To infinity and beyond!" — Buzz Lightyear, Toy Story
6. "That rug really tied the room together." — The Dude, The Big Lebowski
7. "I'm not a smart man, but I know what love is." — Forrest Gump, Forrest Gump

A quick caution on these: credit the character and the film. Quoting a screen line as if the actor said it off the cuff is how attributions get muddy, and a movie quote is funniest when you know exactly where it's from.

Everyday observations and one-liners

The quick ones. Most have no confirmed author, which is normal for jokes that spread by word of mouth.

1. "I followed my heart, and it led me to the fridge." — Author unknown
2. "People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day." — Author unknown
3. "Some cause happiness wherever they go, others whenever they go." — commonly misattributed to Oscar Wilde
4. "All those who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand." — Emo Philips
5. "My bed is a magical place where I suddenly remember everything I forgot to do." — Author unknown
6. "I'm not lazy, I'm on energy-saving mode." — Author unknown
7. "Mirror: you look amazing today. Camera: LOL, no." — Author unknown
8. "Sometimes I shock myself with the smart stuff I say and do. Other times I try to get out of the car with my seatbelt on." — Author unknown
9. "Sarcasm: because beating the crap out of people is illegal." — Author unknown

That "happiness wherever they go" line is the one to watch. It gets credited to Oscar Wilde constantly, but its earliest print appearance is a 1908 magazine, eight years after he died. So it's a misattribution, and the real author is anonymous. The telekinesis joke really is Emo Philips, who has performed it for decades.

Sourced gems from real comedians and writers

Here is the rare bunch where the joke and the name actually match. These come from books, albums, and on-the-record acts, so you can quote them with the right person and feel good about it.

1. "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member." — Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me (1959)
2. "I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book." — commonly attributed to Groucho Marx (in print by 1950)
3. "The report of my death was an exaggeration." — Mark Twain, to the New York Journal (1897)
4. "Classic: a book which people praise and don't read." — Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897)
5. "I intend to live forever. So far, so good." — commonly attributed to Steven Wright
6. "I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done." — commonly attributed to Steven Wright
7. "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." — commonly attributed to Dorothy Parker
8. "That's all your house is: a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff." — George Carlin, Carlin on Campus (1984)
9. "If pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters." — Nora Ephron, Heartburn (1983)
10. "Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth." — Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006)
11. "There's no sunrise so beautiful that it is worth waking me up to see it." — Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (2011)

Two of these are worth a footnote. Groucho's club line is the cleaned-up version of a telegram he sent resigning from the Friars' Club, and he tells the story himself in his 1959 memoir. The Twain line is the real one. After a newspaper ran his obituary while he was alive and well, he did not say "reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." He said the death "was an exaggeration." The snappier version is a later edit. The Steven Wright and Dorothy Parker lines are firmly part of their acts, but lack a single clean primary source, so they carry a light hedge.

How to use these quotes

The good news about a one-liner is that it travels. If one of these landed for you, drop it into the QuoteGenerator and make a clean image with the attribution on it, Author unknown and all. Getting the credit right is the whole point, and it's the part most quote images skip.

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