Quotes by Humorists - Page 15

The happiest time in any man's life is when he is in red-hot pursuit of a dollar with a reasonable prospect of overtaking it.
Josh Billings
It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt
Mark Twain
I read the paragraph again. A peculiar feeling it gave me. I don't know if you have ever experienced the sensation of seeing the announcement of the engagement of a pal of yours to a girl whom you were only saved from marrying yourself by the skin of your teeth. It induces a sort of -- well, it's difficult to describe it exactly; but I should imagine a fellow would feel much the same if he happened to be strolling through the jungle with a boyhood chum and met a tigress or a jaguar, or what not, and managed to shin up a tree and looked down and saw the friend of his youth vanishing into the undergrowth in the animal's slavering jaws. A sort of profound, prayerful relief, if you know what I mean, blended at the same time with a pang of pity. What I'm driving at is that, thankful as I was that I hadn't had to marry Honoria myself, I was sorry to see a real good chap like old Biffy copping it. I sucked down a spot of tea and began brooding over the business.
P.G. Wodehouse
He burst into the house and ate Grandma, an entirely valid course of action for a carnivore such as himself.
James Finn Garner
It is the bungled crime that brings remorse.
P.G. Wodehouse
When Eve upon the first of MenThe apple press’d with specious cant,Oh! what a thousand pities thenThat Adam was not adamant!
Thomas Hood
One year I went as a pirate, but from then on I went as a hobo. It's a word you don't hear anymore. Along with 'tramp,' it's been replaced by 'homeless person,' which isn't the same thing. Unlike someone who was evicted or lost his house in a fire, the hobo roughed it by choice. Being at liberty, unencumbered by bills and mortgages, better suited his drinking schedule, and so he found shelter wherever he could, never a bum, but something much less threatening, a figure of merriment, almost.
David Sedaris
Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.
Mark Twain
A man's idee in a card game is war- crool devastatin' and pitiless. A lady's idee iv it is a combynation iv larceny embezzlement an' burglary.
Finley Peter Dunne
No sun—no moon! No morn—no noon—No dawn— No sky—no earthly view— No distance looking blue—No road—no street—no "t'other side the way"— No end to any Row— No indications where the Crescents go— No top to any steeple—No recognitions of familiar people— No courtesies for showing 'em— No knowing 'em!No traveling at all—no locomotion,No inkling of the way—no notion— "No go"—by land or ocean— No mail—no post— No news from any foreign coast—No park—no ring—no afternoon gentility— No company—no nobility—No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member—No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds, November!
Thomas Hood
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
Mark Twain
The hardest thing is to take less when you can get more.
Kin Hubbard
The trouble with aggressive nonsmokers is that they feel they are doing you a favor by not allowing you to smoke. They seem to think that one day you'll look back and thank them for those precious fifteen seconds they just added to your life. What they don't understand is that those are just fifteen more seconds you can spend hating their guts and plotting revenge.
David Sedaris
At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.
David Sedaris
I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up. ~Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad
Mark Twain
You can't pray a lie--I found that out.
Mark Twain
When you put down the good things you ought to have done and leave out the bad things you did do - well that's memoirs.
Will Rogers
There is nothing so stupid as an educated man if you get off the thing that he was educated in.
Will Rogers
Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We're number two!
David Sedaris
Courage is resistance to fear mastery of fear-not absence of fear.
Mark Twain
The walking tour guides one through the city's various landmarks, reciting bits of information the listener might find enlightening. I learned, for example, that in the late 1500s my little neighborhood square was a popular spot for burning people alive. Now lined with a row of small shops, the tradition continues, though in a figurative rather than literal sense.
David Sedaris
I come from a home where gravy is a beverage.
Erma Bombeck
If you think it ain’t dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way, by yourself, in the night, you try it once – you’ll see.
Mark Twain
Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.
Mark Twain
So I learned then, that gold in it's native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.
Mark Twain
Anybody who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad.
Leo Rosten
You can tell German wine from vinegar ... by the label.
Mark Twain
This is one of the defining sorrows of books: that we cannot see one another.
John Hodgman
Wherever he found his speech growing too modern -- which was about every sentence or two -- he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as "exceeding sore," "and it came to pass," etc., and made things satisfactory again. "And it came to pass" was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.
Mark Twain
Employers are like horses — they require management.
P.G. Wodehouse
There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous andshallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said 'Faith is believing what youknow ain't so'.
Mark Twain
I lost Susy thirteen years ago; I lost her mother--her incomparable mother!--five and a half years ago; Clara has gone away to live in Europe and now I have lost Jean. How poor I am, who was once so rich! . . . Jean lies yonder, I sit here; we are strangers under our own roof; we kissed hands good-by at this door last night--and it was forever, we never suspecting it. She lies there, and I sit here--writing, busying myself, to keep my heart from breaking. How dazzling the sunshine is flooding the hills around! It is like a mockery. Seventy-four years ago twenty-four days. Seventy-four years old yesterday. Who can estimate my age today?
Mark Twain
When they came it was as if the lord of the world had arrived, and had brought all the glories of its kingdoms along; and when they went they left a calm behind which was like the deep sleep which follows an orgy.
Mark Twain
Laughter is a tranquilizer without after-effects.
Arnold Glasgow
Q. Why don't the British panic?A. They do, but very quietly. It is impossible for the naked eye to tell their panic from their ecstasy.
George Mikes
At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about: the person who doesn't own one is a curiosity.
Mark Twain
How about "diamonds are a girl's best friends"? Nope. It should be switched around and pointed out, instead, that your best friends are diamonds.
Gina Barreca
Other useful commands to teach your dog are 'stay,' 'heel,' 'remove your snout from that person's groin,' 'stop humping the Barcalounger,' 'do not bark violently for two hours at inanimate objects such as a flowerpot,' ' do not eat poop,' and 'if you must eat poop, then at least refrain from licking my face afterward'.
Dave Barry
In the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money cannot buy...to wit--the wag of a dog's tail.
Josh Billings
Th' prisidincy is th' highest office in th' gift iv th people. Th' vice-prisidincy is th' next highest an' the lowest. It isn't a crime exactly. Ye can't be sint to jail f r it but it's a kind iv a disgrace.
Finley Peter Dunne
Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.
Mark Twain
A consciously exaggerated compliment is an offense.
Mark Twain
Cats are people, and the sooner the world accepts that fact, the better off the world will be.
H. Allen Smith
A woman's intuition is better than a man's. Nobody knows anything, really, you know, and a woman can guess a good deal nearer than a man.
Mark Twain
The past is the tomorrow that got away.
Leonard L. Levinson
There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, 'Do trousers matter?'""The mood will pass, sir.
P.G. Wodehouse
In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.
Mark Twain
It bothered me that the bag bothered me more than head did, but what are you going to do? A person doesn't conciously choose what he focuses on. Those things choose you, and, once they do, nothing, it seems, can shake them.
David Sedaris
It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million sperm cells... to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin.
Dave Barry
Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren't.
David Sedaris
To get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
Mark Twain
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
Mark Twain
If we hadn’t our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries-the ice storm: when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top – ice that is as bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dew-drops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia’s diamond plume. Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold-the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence. One cannot make the words too strong.
Mark Twain
What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!
Mark Twain
The rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate.
David Sedaris
He was always in a sort of fever because he was dropping behind schedule with his daily acts of kindness. However hard he tried, he'd fall behind; and then you would find him prowling about the house, setting such a clip to try and catch up with himself that Easeby was rapidly becoming a perfect hell for man and beast.
P.G. Wodehouse
What a good thing Adam had - when he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.
Mark Twain
Ethical man - a Christian holding four aces.
Mark Twain
Necessity is the mother of taking chances.
Mark Twain
Captain Bradbury's right eyebrow had now become so closely entangled with his left that there seemed no hope of ever extricating it without the aid of powerful machinery.
P.G. Wodehouse