Quotes by Humorists - Page 20

We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can "show off" and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off.
Mark Twain
If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.
Mark Twain
I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
Mark Twain
Don't put off till tomorrow what can be enjoyed today.
Josh Billings
Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.
Will Cuppy
In statesmanship get formalities right never mind about the moralities.
Mark Twain
The emperor is naked!"The parade stopped. The emperor paused. A hush fell over the crowd, until one quick-thinking peasant shouted:"No, he isn't. The emperor is merely endorsing a clothing-optional lifestyle!
James Finn Garner
Debt is a trap which man sets and baits himself and then deliberately gets into.
Josh Billings
Every one knew he could foretell wars and famines, though that was not so hard, for there was always a war, and generally a famine somewhere.
Mark Twain
I asked Tom if countries always apologized when they had done wrong and he said: "Yes: the little one does."
Mark Twain
If an animal does something, we call it instinct. If we do the same thing for the same reason, we call it intelligence.
Will Cuppy
Write what you know.
Mark Twain
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Robert Benchley
Stars and shadows ain't good to see by.
Mark Twain
People are often frightened of Parisians, but an American in Paris will find no harsher critic than another American.
David Sedaris
O God! that bread should be so dear And flesh and blood so cheap!
Thomas Hood
I'm not a parent myself, but I think the best solution at this point is to slap that child across the face. It won't stop crying, but at least now it'll be doing it for a good reason.
David Sedaris
You can't be envious and happy at the same time.
Frank Tyger
If I had my way no one should be taught to read until after he had passed his hundredth year. In that way, and in that way only can we protect our youth from the dreadful influence of such novels as 'Three Cycles, Not To Mention The Rug,' which dreadful book I have found within the past month in the hands of at least twenty children in the neighborhood, not one of whom was past sixty.
John Kendrick Bangs
Your flag and my flag And how it flies today In your land and my land And half a world away! Rose-red and blood-reed The stripes forever gleam Snow-white and soul-white - The good forefathers' dream Sky-blue and true-blue with stars to gleam aright - The gloried guidon of the day a shelter through the night.
Wilbur D. Nesbit
HARV, can you help at all here?” I asked, spinning downward.“I am writing your obituary. Well, not so much writing it as updating it,” HARV told me.If I lived, I was going to kill HARV.
John Zakour
Then the cow asked:"What is a mirror?""It is a hole in the wall," said the cat. "You look in it, and there you see the picture, and it is so dainty and charming and ethereal and inspiring in its unimaginable beauty that your head turns round and round, and you almost swoon with ecstasy.
Mark Twain
Are we labouring at some Work too vast for us to perceive? Are our passions and desires mere whips and traces by the help of which we are driven? Any theory seems more hopeful than the thought that all our eager, fretful lives are but the turning of a useless prison crank. Looking back the little distance that our dim eyes can penetrate the past, what do we find? Civilizations, built up with infinite care, swept aside and lost. Beliefs for which men lived and died, proved to be mockeries. Greek Art crushed to the dust by Gothic bludgeons. Dreams of fraternity, drowned in blood by a Napoleon. What is left to us, but the hope that the work itself, not the result, is the real monument? Maybe, we are as children, asking, "Of what use are these lessons? What good will they ever be to us?" But there comes a day when the lad understands why he learnt grammar and geography, when even dates have a meaning for him. But this is not until he has left school, and gone out into the wider world. So, perhaps, when we are a little more grown up, we too may begin to understand the reason for our living
Jerome K. Jerome
It’s only when you’re at the bottom of the ladder that you ascend.
Gina Barreca
Natives of the Florida Keys often refer to themselves as Conchs, and for good reason: They have been drinking.
Dave Barry
There spoke the race!" he said; "always ready to claim what it hasn't got, and mistake its ounce of brass filings for a ton of gold-dust. You have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more; a multitude of you possess that. This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade and trivial things--broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision. Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them--and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon--laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution-- these can lift at a colossal humbug--push it a little--weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage.
Mark Twain
Everyone is guilty at one time or another of throwing out questions that beg to be ignored, but mothers seem to have a market on the supply. "Do you want a spanking or do you want to go to bed?" Don't you want to save some of the pizza for your brother?" Wasn't there any change?
Erma Bombeck
Walking into Nova Hollywood, I remembered why I didn’t come here more often. I like a good slice of cheese as much as the next guy, but this place would be too cheesy for a giant mutant rat who had been starving for a week.
John Zakour
It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.
Erma Bombeck
The voice of Love seemed to call to me, but it was a wrong number.
P.G. Wodehouse
Carol, I thought you didn't liked playing with the minds of normal people.”“Yes, but the press don't count as normal.”“She’s got you there,” HARV added.
John Zakour
Heaven goes by favor if it went by merit you would stay out and your dog would go in.
Mark Twain
I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.
P.G. Wodehouse
Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in your ear.
Dave Barry
I have been studying the principles of socialism deeply of late, and I came to the conclusion that I must join the cause. It looked good to me. You work for the equal distribution of property and start in by swiping all you can and sitting on it. Ah, noble scheme! Me for it!
P.G. Wodehouse
No matter whether the Constitution follows the flag or not the Supreme Court follows the election returns.
Finley Peter Dunne
There is, incidentally, no way of talking about cats that enables one to come off as a sane person.
Dan Greenberg
Tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice!
Mark Twain
Randall, the gay alcoholic in the house next door, boldly peeps through my windows. 'Boy, you sure rock in that chair a lot,' he said last week, his face pressed against my screen. This time I was lying on my bed with Katherine's cats. I'm watching them while she's out of town. I can be very mushy, and he watched me kissing them and saying that all the other cats in the neighborhood were jealous of their beauty.
David Sedaris
Libraries are brothels for the mind. Which means that librarians are the madams, greeting punters, understanding their strange tastes and needs, and pimping their books.
Guy Browning
It is very strange, this domination of our intellect by our digestive organs. We cannot work, we cannot think, unless our stomach wills so. It dictates to us our emotions, our passions. After eggs and bacon it says, "Work!" After beefsteak and porter, it says, "Sleep!" After a cup of tea (two spoonfuls for each cup, and don't let it stand for more than three minutes), it says to the brain, "Now rise, and show your strength. Be eloquent, and deep, and tender; see, with a clear eye, into Nature, and into life: spread your white wings of quivering thought, and soar, a god-like spirit, over the whirling world beneath you, up through long lanes of flaming stars to the gates of eternity!
Jerome K. Jerome
The best of all lost arts is honesty
Mark Twain
I always advise people never to give advice.
P.G. Wodehouse
It was such ecstacy to dream, and dream - till you got a bite.A scorpion bite. Then the first duty was to get up out of the grass and kill the scorpion; and the next to bathe the bitten place with alcohol or brandy; and the next to resolve to keep out of the grass in the future. Then came an adjournment to the bedchamber and the pastime of writing up the day's journal with one hand and the destruction of mosquitoes with the other - a whole community of them at a slap. Then, observing an enemy approaching - a hairy tarantula on stilts - why not set the spittoon on him? It is done, and the projecting ends of his paws give a luminous idea of the magnitude of his reach. Then to bed and become a promenade for a centipede with forty-two legs on a side and every foot hot enough to burn a whole through a raw-hide. More soaking with alcohol, and a resolution to examine the bed before entering it, in future. Then wait, and suffer, till all the mosquitoes in the neighborhood have crawled in under the bar, then slip out quickly, shut them in and sleep peacefully on the floor till morning. Meantime, it is comforting to curse the tropics in occasional wakeful intervals.
Mark Twain
The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.
David Sedaris
Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.
Mark Twain
Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downswing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you'll run out of dope or liquor and realize that it was all you ever had in common.
David Sedaris
Most times, my mind is just an ongoing, present-tense, first-person monologue. It's like I'm writing a novel.
Andrew Shaffer
Growing up is when you understand you get what you give, not what you're given.
Guy Browning
Pity costs nothin' and ain't worth nothin'.
Josh Billings
The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.
Kin Hubbard
Hobbies of any kind are boring except to people who have the same hobby. This is also true of religion, although you will not find me saying so in print.
Dave Barry
The odds of going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are three billion to one.
Erma Bombeck
This is the age of the specialist, and years ago Rollo had settled on his career. Even as a boy, hardly capable of connected thought, he had been convinced that his speciality, the one thing he could do really well, was to inherit money.
P.G. Wodehouse
The name Alaska is probably an abbreviation of Unalaska, derived from the original Aleut word agunalaksh, which means "the shores where the sea breaks its back." The war between water and land is never-ending. Waves shatter themselves in spent fury against the rocky bulwarks of the coast; giant tides eat away the sand beaches and alter the entire contour of an island overnight; williwaw winds pour down the side of a volcano like snow sliding off a roof, building to a hundred-mile velocity in a matter of minutes and churning the ocean into a maelstrom where the stoutest vessels founder.
Corey Ford
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Mark Twain
I looked at the piles of plates and cups, and kettles, and bottles and jars, and pies and stoves, and cakes, and tomatoes, &c., and felt that the thing would soon become exciting. It did. They started with breaking a cup. That was the first thing they did. They did that just to show you what they COULD do, and to get you interested.
Jerome K. Jerome
Ambition is enthusiasm with a purpose.
Frank Tyger
She kept up her compliments, and I kept up my determination to deserve them or die.
Mark Twain
Adversity has the same effect on a man that severe training has on the pugilist: it reduces him to his fighting weight.
Josh Billings