Quotes by Humorists - Page 18

Nature has no originality--I mean, no large ability in the matter of inventing new things, new ideas, new stage effects. She has a superb and amazing and infinitely varied equipment of old ones, but she never adds to them. She repeats--repeats--repeats--repeats. Examine your memory and your experience; you will find it is true.
Mark Twain
There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.
P.G. Wodehouse
I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead Spenser is dead so is Milton so is Shakespeare and I'm not feeling so well myself.
Mark Twain
A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.
Mark Twain
Most times, my mind is just an ongoing, present-tense, first-person monologue. It's like I'm writing a novel, constantly, but only in my brain.
Andrew Shaffer
You bastard, stop that whistling and fight me like a man!
John Zakour
Many a man who falls in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.
Evan Esar
What is instinct? It is the natural tendency in one when filled with dismay to turn to his wife.
Finley Peter Dunne
Thing is, I am not a big fan of hovers. I firmly believe that if man was meant to fly we’d have feathers, rubber bones, or better insurance coverage.
John Zakour
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stovelid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again - and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
Mark Twain
Everybody is ignorant only on different subjects.
Will Rogers
I situate myself, and seat myself,And where you recline I shall recline,For every armchair belonging to you as good as belongs to me.I loaf and curl up my tailI yawn and loaf at my ease after rolling in the catnip p
Henry N. Beard
We hit the sunny beaches where we occupy ourselves keeping the sun off our skin, the saltwater off our bodies, and the sand out of our belongings.
Erma Bombeck
For the first twenty years of my life, I rocked myself to sleep. It was a harmless enough hobby, but eventually, I had to give it up. Throughout the next twenty-two years I lay still and discovered that after a few minutes I could drop off with no problem. Follow seven beers with a couple of scotches and a thimble of good marijuana, and it’s funny how sleep just sort of comes on its own. Often I never even made it to the bed. I’d squat down to pet the cat and wake up on the floor eight hours later, having lost a perfectly good excuse to change my clothes. I’m now told that this is not called “going to sleep” but rather “passing out,” a phrase that carries a distinct hint of judgment.
David Sedaris
Bravery is being the only one who knows you're afraid.
Franklin P. Jones
It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself but the most inconvenient too.
Josh Billings
Health food makes me sick.
Calvin Trillin
When majority is insane, sane must go to asylum.
Mark Twain
There are various methods by which you may achieve ignominy and shame. By murdering a large and respected family in cold blood and afterward depositing their bodies in the water companies' reservoir, you will gain much unpopularity in the neighborhood of your crime, and even robbing a church will get you cordially disliked, especially by the vicar. But if you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human creature can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it.
Jerome K. Jerome
It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch one another and find sympathy. We differ widely enough in our nobler qualities. It is in our follies that we are at one.
Jerome K. Jerome
A slander is like a hornet if you cannot kill it dead the first blow better not strike at it.
H. W. Shaw
The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up.
Mark Twain
Kill the women? No – nobody ever saw anything in the books like that. You fetch them to the cave, and you’re always as polite as pie to them; and by-and-by they fall in love with you and never want to go home any more.
Mark Twain
Really, seeing the amount we give in charity, the wonder is there are any poor left. It is a comfort that there are. What should we do without them? Our fur-clad little girls! our jolly, red-faced squires! we should never know how good they were, but for the poor? Without the poor how could we be virtuous? We should have to go about giving to each other. And friends expect such expensive presents, while a shilling here and there among the poor brings to us all the sensations of a good Samaritan. Providence has been very thoughtful in providing us with poor.
Jerome K. Jerome
Sometimes travel is merely an opportunity taken when you can.
Ian Frazier
Oh what a blamed uncertain thing This pesky weather is It blew and snew and then it thew And now by jing it's friz.
Philander Johnson
It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it.
Mark Twain
Miami drivers will attempt to pass you inside a car wash.
Dave Barry
They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever.
Mark Twain
I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts.
Mark Twain
There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress.
Mark Twain
Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.
Dave Barry
Most men would rather be charged with malice than with making a blunder.
Josh Billings
It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something's said by a stranger I've been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, "Listen. I'm with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election.
David Sedaris
The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.
Mark Twain
I have too much respect for the truth to drag it out on every trifling occasion.
Mark Twain
The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.
Mark Twain
I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
P.G. Wodehouse
Call me a proud American, if you want, but I truly believe that no other nation on Earth possesses the capabilities to put on a more powerful display of underwater mermaid patriotism.
Dave Barry
No shade no shine no butterflies no bees No fruits no flowers no leaves no birds November!
Thomas Hood
The Hawaiian language is quite unusual because when the original Polynesians came in their canoes, most of their consonants were washed overboard in a storm, and they arrived here with almost nothing but vowels. All the streets have names like Kal'ia'iou'amaa'aaa'eiou, and many street signs spontaneously generate new syllables during the night.
Dave Barry
Whin a man gets to be my age he ducks political meetin's an' reads th' papers an' weighs th' ividence an' th' argymints - pro-argymints an' con-argymints an' makes up his mind ca'mly an' votes th' Dimmycratic Ticket.
Finley Peter Dunne
When I was a boy of fourteen my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
Mark Twain
Children and fools always speak the truth.
Mark Twain
Everything comes to him who waits, except a loaned book.
Kin Hubbard
The schools ain't what they used to be and never was.
Will Rogers
There is, of course, this to be said for the Omnibus Book in general and this one in particular. When you buy it, you have got something. The bulk of this volume makes it almost the ideal paper-weight. The number of its pages assures its posessor of plenty of shaving paper on his vacation. Place upon the waistline and jerked up and down each morning, it will reduce embonpoint and strengthen the abdominal muscles. And those still at their public school will find that between, say, Caesar's Commentaries in limp cloth and this Jeeves book there is no comparison as a missile in an inter-study brawl.
P.G. Wodehouse
Intellectual 'work' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the magician with the fiddle-bow in his hand, who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him - why, certainly he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair - but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash also.
Mark Twain
When asked "What do we need to learn this for?" any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness.
David Sedaris
To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, "Our Country, right or wrong," and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?
Mark Twain
But having people meet my family was a secret fear. It would be like taking someone to a dark room to show them my anal fissures, and you can't just go introducing everybody to your anal fissures. Only special people get to see such as that.
Harrison Scott Key
If you don't want me to attend the patient I'll go.''But she can't see a doctor now.''Why not?''She isn't well.
P.G. Wodehouse
There is no pathos more bitter than that of parting from someone we have never met.
P.G. Wodehouse
Henry VIII had so many wives because his dynastic sense was very strong whenever he saw a maid of honour.
Will Cuppy
Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
Finley Peter Dunne
I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws.
S.J. Perelman
The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him--why, certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same.
Mark Twain
Nobody ever forgets where he buried a hatchet.
Kin Hubbard
Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
Mark Twain
As our means increase, so do our desires;and we ever stand midway between the two.
Jerome K. Jerome