Quotes by Humorists - Page 13

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.
Mark Twain
There are two days about which nobody should ever worry and these are yesterday and tomorrow.
Robert Jones Burdette
Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered — either by themselves or by others. But for the Civil War, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan would not have been discovered, nor have risen into notice.
Mark Twain
Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.
Erma Bombeck
Scream at the mangled leather carcass lying at the foot of the stairs, and my parents would roar with laughter. "That's what you get for leaving your wallet on the kitchen table.
David Sedaris
It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
P.G. Wodehouse
A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.
Mark Twain
Travel is fatal to prejudice bigotry and narrow-mindedness.
Mark Twain
I don't like to commit myself about Heaven and Hell, you see, I have friends in both places.
Mark Twain
To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.
Mark Twain
One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.
P.G. Wodehouse
But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.
Mark Twain
If he didn`t want his opinion,why did he ask for it?
Jerome K. Jerome
He's such a dear, Mr. Garnet. A beautiful, pure, bred Persian. He has taken prizes.""He's always taking something - generally food.
P.G. Wodehouse
...there was practically one handwriting common to the whole school when it came to writing lines. It resembled the movements of a fly that had fallen into an ink-pot, and subsequently taken a little brisk exercise on a sheet of foolscap by way of restoring the circulation.
P.G. Wodehouse
Someone who managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.
Calvin Trillin
You can survive up to three weeks without food. You can only survive for three days without water. No one knows how many days you can survive without caffeine.
Andrew Shaffer
She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.
P.G. Wodehouse
It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
Mark Twain
The more you read about politics the more you got to admit that each party is worse than the other.
Will Rogers
He does love prophesying a misfortune, does the average British ghost. Send him out to prognosticate trouble to somebody, and he is happy. Let him force his way into a peaceful home, and turn the whole house upside down by foretelling a funeral, or predicting a bankruptcy, or hinting at a coming disgrace, or some other terrible disaster, about which nobody in their senses would want to know sooner than they could possible help, and the prior knowledge of which can serve no useful purpose whatsoever, and he feels that he is combining duty with pleasure. He would never forgive himself if anybody in his family had a trouble and he had not been there for a couple of months beforehand, doing silly tricks on the lawn or balancing himself on somebody's bedrail.("Introduction" to TOLD AFTER SUPPER)
Jerome K. Jerome
I said it was a brutal thing."No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it,
Mark Twain
Great Gates almighty,” HARV said inside my brain. “I go off-line for a few nanos and the whole world goes to DOS.
John Zakour
Parents can tell but never teach, unless they practice what they preach.
Arnold H. Glasow
The butler entered the room a solemn procession of one.
P.G. Wodehouse
I love things made out of animals. It's just so funny to think of someone saying, "I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.
David Sedaris
I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
Mark Twain
Every author really wants to have letters printed in the paper. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.
P.G. Wodehouse
Peace and rest at length have comeAll the day's long toil is past,And each heart is whispering, 'Home,Home at last.
Thomas Hood
Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, it's at the end of your arm, as you get older, remember you have another hand: The first is to help yourself, the second is to help others.
Sam Levenson
When Molly O'Toole was looking at the colored pictures in Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's big dictionary and just happened to be eating a candy cane at the same time and drooled candy cane juice on the colored pictures of gems and then forgot and shut the book so the pages all stuck together, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle didn't say, "Such a careless little girl can never ever look at the colored pictures in my dictionary again." Nor did she say, "You must never look at books when you are eating." She said, "Let's see, I think we can steam those pages apart, and then we can wipe the stickiness off with a little soap and water, like this-now see, it's just as good as new. There's nothing as cozy as a piece of candy and a book.
Betty MacDonald
Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
Erma Bombeck
School plays were invented partly to give parents and easy opportunity to demonstrate their priorities.
Calvin Trillin
Oratory: the art of making deep noises from the chest sound like important messages from the brain.
H. I. Phillips
Violence and smut are of course everywhere on the airwaves. You cannot turn on your television without seeing them, although sometimes you have to hunt around.
Dave Barry
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
Mark Twain
My advice to those who are about to begin in earnest the journey of life is to take their heart in one hand and a club in the other.
Josh Billings
All of us have moments in out lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.
Erma Bombeck
The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.
Mark Twain
Then a beat-up car lurched into sight towing an even more beat-up car. As the cars came near, I saw that they were connected back to front by a loop made of two seat belts buckled to each other. That was the only time I ever saw a Russian use a seat belt for any purpose at all.
Ian Frazier
Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common-sense.
Helen Rowland
Most people like hard work particularly when they're paying for it.
Franklin P. Jones
I flung open the door. I got a momentary flash of about a hundred and fifteen cats of all sizes and colours scrapping in the middle of the room, and then they all shot past me with a rush and out of the front door; and all that was left of the mobscene was the head of a whacking big fish, lying on the carpet and staring up at me in a rather austere sort of way, as if it wanted a written explanation and apology.
P.G. Wodehouse
To slur “feminism” into “humanism” is to usurp women’s voices once again, to make the singular feminine into the so-called universal masculine.
Gina Barreca
I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself.
David Sedaris
She was, in short, melted by his distress, as so often happens with the female sex. Poets have frequently commented on this. You are probably familiar with the one who said, "Oh, woman in our hours of ease tum tumty tiddly something please, when something something something brow, a something something something thou.
P.G. Wodehouse
There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas — something about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts, like the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails.
Jerome K. Jerome
A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.
Mark Twain
Why, human thought is a real element, a real force, darting out like electricity from every man's or woman's mind, injuring or relieving, killing or curing, building fortunes or tearing them down, working for good or ill, every moment, night or day, asleep or awake, carving, moulding and shaping people's faces and making them ugly or agreeable.
Prentice Mulford
I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on the hearth on a winter's evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream... I know how the nuts taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider, and doughnuts, make old people's tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting.
Mark Twain
He couldn't get into Harvard even if he had the dean's wife at gunpoint.
Dave Barry
The ideal adventurer needs... the quality of not being content to mind his own affairs...
P.G. Wodehouse
Human nature is all alike.
Mark Twain
A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.
Leo Rosten
A bore is a man who spends so much time talking about himself that you can't talk about yourself.
Melville Landon
I had been to school most all the time, and could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway.
Mark Twain
Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.
David Sedaris
I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.
P.G. Wodehouse
There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say "Yes I've got dreams of course I've got dreams." Then they put the box away and bring it out once in a while to look in it and yep they're still there. These are great dreams but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line to hold them up and say "How good or how bad am I?" That's where courage comes in.
Erma Bombeck
It ain't no disgrace for a man to fall but to lie there and grunt is.
Josh Billings