Quotes by Humorists - Page 3

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
Mark Twain
He turned the music up loud. So what if it would deafen him? It made him happy. Like it had so many times before.
Stuart McLean
The ideas of debtor and creditor as to what constitutes a good time never coincide.
P.G. Wodehouse
Laugh now, cry later.
Erma Bombeck
By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity – another man’s, I mean.
Mark Twain
It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness poverty and wealth have both failed.
Kin Hubbard
I'm the most important person in the lives of almost everyone I know and a good number of the people I've never even met.
David Sedaris
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
Jerome K. Jerome
At a national political convention, you have hundreds of people who consider themselves at least as important as the Secretary of Commerce. If it's a Democratic convention, you also have dozens of A-list Hollywood and music celebrities. (If it's a Republican convention, you have Bo Derek.) Also you have swarms of lower-ranking Washington minions with titles like Deputy Assistant to the Associate Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff who are trying to move up the ladder to Deputy Associate to the Assistant Acting Deputy Assistant Understudy.
Dave Barry
It isn't often that Aunt Dahlia lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them.
P.G. Wodehouse
I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.
Mark Twain
There's one thing about baldness - it's neat.
Don Herold
Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.
Mark Twain
The year's in the wane There is nothing adoring The night has no eve And the day has no morning Cold winter gives warning!
Thomas Hood
It was a bitter moment for us. We weren't two mature parents. We were just two kids playing grown-up. We still needed Mommy and Daddy's permission, blessings, and money to survive.
Erma Bombeck
When you see what some girls marry, you realize how they must hate to work for a living.
Helen Rowland
Thought is everything. Pain is something. Hence where there is no thought there can be no pain. Wherefore if you have a pain it is evident that you have a thought. To be rid of the pain stop thinking.
John Kendrick Bangs
It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.
Mark Twain
Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one basket" - which is but a matter of saying, "Scatter your money and your attention"; but the wise man saith, "Pull all your eggs in the one basket and - WATCH THAT BASKET." - Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
Mark Twain
My mother was, for the most part, delighted with my brother and regarded him with the bemused curiosity of a brood hen discovering she has hatched a completely different species. 'I think it was very nice of Paul to give me this vase,' she once said, arranging a bouquet of wildflowers into the skull-shaped bong my brother had left on the kitchen table. 'It's nontraditional, but that's the Rooster's way. He's a free spirit, and we're lucky to have him.
David Sedaris
There is work that is work and there is play that is play there is play that is work and work that is play. And in only one of these lie happiness.
Gelett Burgess
You know that kind of quiver that trembles around through you when you are seeing something so strange and enchanting and wonderful that it is just a fearful joy to be alive and look at it; and you know how you gaze, and your lips turn dry and your breath comes short, but you wouldn't be anywhere but there, not for the world.
Mark Twain
Across town, over in the East Village, the graffiti was calling for the rich to be eaten, imprisoned, or taxed out of existence. Though it sometimes seemed like a nice idea, I hoped the revolution would not take place during my lifetime. I didn't want the rich to go away until I could at least briefly join their ranks.
David Sedaris
One certainty when you travel is the moment you arrive in a foreign country the American dollar will fall like a stone.
Erma Bombeck
Old friends we say are best when some sudden disillusionment shakes our faith in a new comrade.
Gelett Burgess
Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.
P.G. Wodehouse
I mean, if you're asking a fellow to come out of a room so that you can dismember him with a carving knife, it's absurd to tack a 'sir' on to every sentence. The two things don't go together.
P.G. Wodehouse
Necessity is the mother of "taking chances."
Mark Twain
Faith is building on what you know is here so you can reach what you know is there.
Cullen Hightower
Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds.
Mark Twain
There are three kinds of men. The ones that learn by readin’. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.
Will Rogers
Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Mark Twain
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Mark Twain
It is strange the way the ignorant and inexperienced so often and so undeservedly succeed when the informed and the experienced fail. All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
Mark Twain
Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.
Mark Twain
Being an optimist after you've got everything you want doesn't count.
Kin Hubbard
At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.
P.G. Wodehouse
It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness. Poverty and wealth have both failed.
Kin Hubbard
Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.
P.G. Wodehouse
Cheap jewelry, however, is worse than no jewelry at all, and there are very few things in life than are worse than no jewelry at all.
Jill Conner Browne
But old fools is the biggest fools there is.
Mark Twain
He had had much experience of physicians, and said 'the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not'.
Mark Twain
The family. We are a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste coveting one another's desserts hiding shampoo locking each other out of our rooms inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant loving laughing defending and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.
Erma Bombeck
The boys were amazed that I could make such a poem as that out of my own head, and so was I, of course, it being as much a surprise to me as it could be to anybody, for I did not know that it was in me. If any had asked me a single day before if it was in me, I should have told them frankly no, it was not.That is the way with us; we may go on half of our life not knowing such a thing is in us, when in reality it was there all the time, and all we needed was something to turn up that would call for it.
Mark Twain
The government is merely a servant―merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.
Mark Twain
My Aunt Dahlia, who runs a woman's paper called Milady's Boudoir, had recently backed me into a corner and made me promise to write her a few words for her "Husbands and Brothers" page on "What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing". I believe in encouraging aunts, when deserving; and, as there are many worse eggs than her knocking about the metrop, I had consented blithely. But I give you my honest word that if I had had the foggiest notion of what I was letting myself in for, not even a nephew's devotion would have kept me from giving her the raspberry. A deuce of a job it had been, taxing the physique to the utmost. I don't wonder now that all these author blokes have bald heads and faces like birds who have suffered.
P.G. Wodehouse
My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.
Mark Twain
It usually takes me two or three days to prepare an impromptu speech.
Mark Twain
a wise woman puts a grain of sugar in everything she says to a man, and takes a grain of salt with everything he says to her.
Helen Rowland
Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It's unbridled, its unplanned, it's full of suprises.
Erma Bombeck
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
Mark Twain
My shift isn’t over until six,” I say glumly.“Hold on,” he says. He pulls a Blackberry from his coat pocket and taps out a text. It buzzes, and he taps out another text before stashing it back in his pocket. “I think you can take the rest of the afternoon off.”“I only have a week left, but my boss would kill me,” I say.“I’m your boss, Anna.”“What do you mean?”There’s that smile again, the one with all those teeth. “I just bought Walmart,” he says.
Andrew Shaffer
If you're in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it'll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.
Jack Handey
Great pals we've always been. In fact there was a time when I had an idea I was in love with Cynthia. However, it blew over. A dashed pretty and lively and attractive girl, mind you, but full of ideals and all that. I may be wronging her, but I have an idea that she's the sort of girl who would want a fellow to carve out a career and what not. I know I've heard her speak favourably of Napoleon. So what with one thing and another the jolly old frenzy sort of petered out, and now we're just pals. I think she's a topper, and she thinks me next door to a looney, so everything's nice and matey.
P.G. Wodehouse
But some emotions don't make a lot of noise. It's hard to hear pride. Caring is real faint - like a heartbeat. And pure love why some days it's so quiet you don't even know it's there.
Erma Bombeck
The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.
Mark Twain
Unhappiness is in not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.
Don Herold
Be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside,” is a safe rule for those who would always retain the good opinion of that all-powerful, but somewhat unintelligent, incubus, “the average person,” but the pioneer, the guide, is necessary. That is, if the world is to move forward.
Jerome K. Jerome
We've got a generation now who were born with semiequality. They don't know how it was before, so they think, this isn't too bad. We're working. We have our attache' cases and our three piece suits. I get very disgusted with the younger generation of women. We had a torch to pass, and they are just sitting there. They don't realize it can be taken away. Things are going to have to get worse before they join in fighting the battle.
Erma Bombeck
Travel is fatal to narrowmindedness, prejudice and bigotry.
Mark Twain