Quotes by Humorists - Page 4

The Republicans have their splits right after election and Democrats have theirs just before an election.
Will Rogers
When you have been just told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon.
P.G. Wodehouse
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
Mark Twain
Satan must have been pretty simple, even according to the New Testament, or he wouldn't have led Christ up on a high mountain and offered him the world if he would fall down and worship him. That was a manifestly absurd proposition, because Christ, as the Son of God, already owned the world; and besides, what Satan showed him was only a few rocky acres of Palestine. It is just as if some one should try to buy Rockefeller, the owner of all the Standard Oil Company, with a gallon of kerosene.
Mark Twain
Human nature, at its best, had always been based on a deep heroic restlessness, on wanting something--something else, something more, whether it be true love or a glimpse just beyond the horizon. It was the promise of happiness, not the attainment of it, that had driven the entire engine, the folly and glory of who we are.
Will Ferguson
Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time.
Mark Twain
The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.
Mark Twain
Housework is what woman does that nobody notices unless she hasn't done it.
Evan Esar
Fewer things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Mark Twain
Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
Mark Twain
The only cure for a real hangover is death.
Robert Benchley
The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly everybody will side with you when you are in the right.
Mark Twain
Like any normal fifth grader, I preferred my villains to be evil and stay that way, to act like Dracula rather than Frankenstein's monster, who ruined everything by handing that peasant girl a flower. He sort of made up for it by drowning her a few minutes later, but, still, you couldn't look at him the same way again.
David Sedaris
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
I told you it was easy,” HARV said.“True, but you say that about everything.”“That's because everything is easy for me.”“Everything but humility.”“No, that's easy, too. I just choose not to practice it.
John Zakour
You aren't really old until nothing is fun enough to make you forget the weather.
Robert Quillen
To be satisfied with what one has that is wealth. As long as one sorely needs a certain additional amount that man isn't rich.
Mark Twain
It ain't so much trouble to get rich as it is to tell when we have got rich.
Josh Billings
You can always get someone to love you - even if you have to do it yourself.
Tom Masson
Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for go live with a car battery.
Erma Bombeck
Bizim hepimizin içinde zübüklük olmasa, bizler de birer zübük olmasak, aramızdan böyle zübükler büyüyemezdi. Hepimizde birer parça olan zübüklük birleşip işte başımıza böyle zübükler çıkıyor. Oysa zübüklük bizde, bizim içimizde. Onları biz, kendi zübüklüğümüzden yaratıyoruz. Sonra, kendi zübüklüklerimizin bir tek Zübük’de birleştiğini görünce ona kızıyoruz. Bu zübükler heryerde var, biz zübükler nerde varsak, onlar da orada...
Aziz Nesin
Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.
Mark Twain
Nature never makes any blunders when she makes a fool she means it.
Josh Billings
′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.
Mark Twain
Mr. Mancini had a singular talent for making me uncomfortable. He forced me to consider things I’d rather not think about – the sex of my guitar, for instance. If I honestly wanted to put my hands on a woman, would that automatically mean I could play? Gretchen’s teacher never told her to think of her piano as a boy. Neither did Lisa’s flute teacher, though in that case the analogy was obvious. On the off chance that sexual desire was all it took, I steered clear of Lisa’s instrument, fearing that I might be labeled a prodigy.
David Sedaris
Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.
Mark Twain
Tom Sawyer the Pirate looked around upon the envying juveniles about him and confessed in his heart that this was the proudest moment of his life.
Mark Twain
I don't understand German myself. I learned it at school, but forgot every word of it two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since.
Jerome K. Jerome
Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.
Robert Benchley
Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor both to yourself and to your country let men label you as they may.
Mark Twain
I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.
P.G. Wodehouse
A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives
Mark Twain
We don not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when the glare, and the the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom pageants of an age that has passed away.
Mark Twain
Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with.
Will Rogers
It is by the goodness of god that in our country we have those 3 unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
Mark Twain
He told us that it had been a fine day to-day, and we told him that it had been a fine day yesterday, and then we all told each other that we thought it would be a fine day to-morrow; and George said the crops seemed to be coming up nicely.
Jerome K. Jerome
We all make mistakes, but intelligence enables us to do it on purpose.
Will Cuppy
She said all a body would have to do there [Heaven] was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever.
Mark Twain
And yet it seems so full of comfort and of strength, the night. In its great presence, our small sorrows creep away, ashamed. The day has been so full of fret and care, and our hearts have been so full of evil and bitter thoughts, and the world has seemed so hard and wrong to us. Then night, like some great loving mother, gently lays her hand upon our fevered head, and turns our little tear-stained face upto hers, and smiles, and though she does not speak, we know what she would say, and lay our hot flushed cheek against her bosom, and the pain is gone.Sometimes, our pain is very deep and real, and we stand before her very silent, because there is no language for our pain, only a moan. Night's heart is full of pity for us: she cannot ease our aching; she takes our hand in hers, and the little world grows very small and very far away beneath us, and borne on her dark wings, we pass for a moment into a mightier presence than her own, and in the wondrous light of that great presence, all human life's like a book before us, and we know that Pain and Sorrow are but the angels of God.
Jerome K. Jerome
Whether it's the best of times or the worst of times it's the only time we've got.
Art Buchwald
A good storyteller is a person who has a good memory and hopes other people haven't.
Irvin S. Cobb
Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit?
David Sedaris
Work is the greatest thing in the world. So we should save some of it for tomorrow.
Don Herold
It is the little things that fret and worry us you can dodge an elephant but not a fly.
Josh Billings
If there is one thing I dislike, it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine.
P.G. Wodehouse
We can't all be heroes because someone has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.
Will Rogers
There isn’t a parallel of latitude but thinks it would have been the equator if it had had its rights.
Mark Twain
You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
Mark Twain
The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking spaces.
Will Rogers
Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.
Will Rogers
Diligence and attention soon gave him the knack of it, and he strode down the street with his mouth full of harmony and his soul full of gratitude. He felt much as an astronomer feels who has discovered a new planet—no doubt, as far as strong, deep, unalloyed pleasure is concerned, the advantage was with the boy, not the astronomer.
Mark Twain
One of the first lessons life teaches us is that on these occasions of back-chat between the delicately-natured, a man should retire into the offing, curl up in a ball, and imitate the prudent tactics of the opossum, which, when danger is in the air, pretends to be dead, frequently going to the length of hanging out crêpe and instructing its friends to gather round and say what a pity it all is.
P.G. Wodehouse
Herodotus says, "Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.
Mark Twain
Conscience is what makes a boy tell his mother before his sister does.
Evan Esar
The purpose of life is not to be happy—but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.
Leo Rosten
While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.
Mark Twain
SilenceTHERE is a silence where hath been no sound,t There is a silence where no sound may be,t In the cold grave—under the deep, deep sea,t Or in wide desert where no life is found,t Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;t No voice is hush'd—no life treads silently,t But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free,t That never spoke, over the idle ground:t But in green ruins, in the desolate wallst Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,t Though the dun fox or wild hyæna calls,t And owls, that flit continually between,t Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan—t There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.
Thomas Hood
Familiarity breeds contempt and children.
Mark Twain
It always has been and always will be the same. The old folk of our grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden; and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation of the next generation. "Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago," has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday. Take up the literature of 1835, and you will find the poets and novelists asking for the same impossible gift as did the German Minnesingers long before them and the old Norse Saga writers long before that. And for the same thing sighed the early prophets and the philosophers of ancient Greece. From all accounts, the world has been getting worse and worse ever since it was created. All I can say is that it must have been a remarkably delightful place when it was first opened to the public, for it is very pleasant even now if you only keep as much as possible in the sunshine and take the rain good-temperedly.
Jerome K. Jerome
He pointed to the money, and said:"The love of it is the root of all evil. There it lies, the ancient tempter, newly red with the shame of its latest victory--the dishonor of a priest of God and his two poor juvenile helpers in crime. If it could but speak, let us hope that it would be constrained to confess that of all its conquests this was the basest and the most pathetic.
Mark Twain