Quotes by Humorists - Page 16

I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying 'flee at once - all is discovered.' They all left town immediately.
Mark Twain
We all enter this world crying. Laughter is something we have to learn
Gina Barreca
Love is a delicate plant that needs constant tending and nurturing, and this cannot be done by snorting at the adored object like a gas explosion and calling her friends lice.
P.G. Wodehouse
Written on her tombstone: "I told you I was sick.
Erma Bombeck
Oh, I'm not saying that alcohol is perfect. It has caused its share of problems. Russia is only one example.
Dave Barry
When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon.It’s a typewriter,’ I say. ‘You use it to write angry letters to airport security.
David Sedaris
The brighter you are, the more you have to learn.
Don Herold
It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand.
Mark Twain
It reflects like an optical instrument and responds to changes in the weather so sensitively that it seems like a part of the sky rather than of the land. And along with all that, Baikal is distinctly Asiatic: if a camel caravan could somehow transport Baikal across Siberia to Europe, and curious buyers unwrapped it in a marketplace, none would mistake it for a lake from around there.
Ian Frazier
Reading... a vacation for the mind....
Dave Barry
Girls do go for the finely-chiselled. And apart from his looks, he's and artist, and there's something about artists that seems to act on the other sex like catnip on cats.
P.G. Wodehouse
The stork is voiceless because there is really nothing to say.
Will Cuppy
(Speaking of the Cistercian monks) A grim fraternity, passing grim lives in that sweet spot, that God had made so bright! Strange that Nature's voices all around them--the soft singing of the waters, the wisperings of the river grass, the music of the rushing wind--should not have taught them a truer meaning of life than this. They listened there, through the long days, in silence, waiting for a voice from heaven; and all day long and through the solemn night it spoke to them in myriad tones, and they heard it not.
Jerome K. Jerome
and so when I couldn't stand it no longer, I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied.
Mark Twain
Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt of, not swallowed.
Josh Billings
The best things in life aren't things.
Art Buchwald
Schoolboy days are no happier than the days of afterlife, but we look back upon them regretfully because we have forgotten our punishments at school and how we grieved when our marbles were lost and our kites destroyed – because we have forgotten all the sorrows and privations of the canonized ethic and remember only its orchard robberies, its wooden-sword pageants, and its fishing holidays.
Mark Twain
There is no man so low down that the cure for his condition does not lie strictly within himself.
Thomas L. Masson
When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.
Dave Barry
When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.
Mark Twain
Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.
Mark Twain
It is not linen you're wearing out But human creatures' lives.
Thomas Hood
Love seems the swiftest but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
Mark Twain
Maybe not, maybe not. Cheer up, Becky, and let's go on trying.
Mark Twain
If you haven't seen your wife smile at a traffic cop, you haven't seen her smile her prettiest.
Kin Hubbard
Suiffy, have you ever felt a sort of strange emptiness in the heart? A sort of aching void of the soul?''Oh, rather!''What do you do about it?''I generally take a couple of cocktails.
P.G. Wodehouse
Tom's whole being applauded this idea. It was deep, and dark, and awful; the hour, the circumstances, the surroundings, were in keeping with it.
Mark Twain
Ah, Antonio, it IS the noblest sport that ever was. I would give a year of my life to see it. Is the bull always killed?"   "Yes. Sometimes a bull is timid, finding himself in so strange a place, and he stands trembling, or tries to retreat. Then everybody despises him for his cowardice and wants him punished and made ridiculous; so they hough him from behind, and it is the funniest thing in the world to see him hobbling around on his severed legs; the whole vast house goes into hurricanes of laughter over it; I have laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks to see it. When he has furnished...
Mark Twain
The best time for you to hold your tongue is the time you feel you must say something or bust.
Josh Billings
My theory on housework is, if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one else cares. Why should you?
Erma Bombeck
If only, I thought, I could talk to Eugene just one more time. This was before I came to understand that you cannot make someone fall in love with you But here's what you can do. By arguing and pleading and screaming and crying and throwing plates and phoning a lot and bringing hot food and sending flowers and buying gifts and doing unsolicited favors and remembering a birthday and being nice and declaring your abiding love and trying hard or sometimes merely by being present, you can make someone who was hitherto lukewarm really detest you.
Patricia Marx
Well, everybody does it that way, Huck.""Tom, I am not everybody.
Mark Twain
Humor is tragedy plus time.
Mark Twain
The wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling.
Mark Twain
The reason is that you eat too many foods that are high in "calories," which are little units that measure how good a particular food tastes. Fudge, for example, has a great many calories, whereas celery, which is not really a food at all but a member of the plywood family, provided by Mother Nature so that mankind would have a way to get onion dip into his mouth at parties, has none.
Dave Barry
A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.
Mark Twain
The time to being writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.
Mark Twain
He would be a consul no doubt by and by, at some foreign port, of the language of which he was ignorant; though if ignorance of language were a qualification he might have been a consul at home.
Mark Twain
Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.
Mark Twain
A proof once established is better left so.
Mark Twain
When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy--that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.
Mark Twain
When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers.
Mark Twain
There is no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet - except in dreams.
Jerome K. Jerome
There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency and a virtue and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency and a vice.
Mark Twain
One never realizes how different a husband and wife can be until they begin to pack for a trip.
Erma Bombeck
O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
Mark Twain
A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit.
Arnold H. Glasow
I love the Olympics, because they enable people from all over the world to come together and--regardless of their political or cultural differences--accuse each other of cheating.
Dave Barry
A woman's flattery may inflate a man's head a little; but her criticism goes straight to his heart, and contracts it so that it can never again hold quite as much love for her.
Helen Rowland
[T]he success of every novel -- if it's a novel of action -- depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, "What are my big scenes?" and then get every drop of juice out of them.", Issue 64, Winter 1975)
P.G. Wodehouse
I liked making people laugh, and I decided I was an atheist early on. My Dad was all right with that. We argued about it all the time, but it was good-natured. He was the most open-minded human being I've ever known.
Dave Barry
When a girl marries, she exchanges the attention of many men for the inattention of one.
Helen Rowland
Maturity understands that there’s darkness in the world but that there’s no need to dwell in it: we can lighten up and offer illumination to others.
Gina Barreca
The preacher who casts a vote for conscience' sake, runs the risk of starving.
Mark Twain
Men have nothing in common with me--there is no point of contact; they have foolish little feelings and foolish little vanities and impertinences and ambitions; their foolish little life is but a laugh, a sigh, and extinction; and they have no sense. Only the Moral Sense. I will show you what I mean. Here is a red spider, not so big as a pin's head. Can you imagine an elephant being interested in him-- caring whether he is happy or isn't, or whether he is wealthy or poor, whether his sweetheart returns his love or not, whether his mother is sick or well, whether he is looked up to in society or not, whether his enemies will smite him or his friends desert him, whether his hopes will suffer blight or his political ambitions fail, whether he shall die in the bosom of his family or neglected and despised in a foreign land? These things can never be important to the elephant; they are nothing to him; he cannot shrink his sympathies to the microscopic size of them. Man is to me as the red spider is to the elephant. The elephant has nothing against the spider--he cannot get down to that remote level; I have nothing against man. The elephant is indifferent; I am indifferent.
Mark Twain
Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
Mark Twain
I also think pronunciation of a foreign tongue could be better taught than by demanding from the pupil those internal acrobatic feats that are generally impossible and always useless. This is the sort of instruction one receives: 'Press your tonsils against the underside of your larynx. Then with the convex part of the septum curved upwards so as almost but not quite to touch the uvula try with the tip of your tongue to reach your thyroid. Take a deep breath and compress your glottis. Now without opening your lips say "Garoo".' And when you have done it they are not satisfied.
Jerome K. Jerome
He done his level best.Was he a mining on the flat..He done it with a zest..Was he a leading of the choir..He done his level best.If he'd a reg'lar task to do,He never took no rest..Or if 'twas off and on the same..He done his level best.If he was preachin' on his beat,He'd tramp from east to west,And north to south ..in cold and heat..He done his level best.He'd Yank a sinner outen (Hades),And land him with the blest;Then snatch a prayer'n waltz in again,And do his level best.He'd cuss and sing and howl and pray,And dance and drink and jest,He done his level best.Whate'er this man was sot to doHe done it with a zest;No matter what his contract was,He'd do his level best...
Mark Twain
Oh God! that bread should be so dear And flesh and blood so cheap!
Thomas Hood
Before a marriage, a man will lie awake all night thinking about something you`ve said; after marriage, he`ll fall asleep before you finish saying it.
Helen Rowland