Quotes by Humorists - Page 7

It gave an appalling idea of the value of an hour, and I thought I could never waste one again without remorse and terror.
Mark Twain
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
Mark Twain
And then I sez—‘How is anybody a-goin’ to live pattern lives, when they are a-starvin' to death? And how is anybody a-goin’ to enjoy religion when they are a-chokin’?
Marietta Holley
You cannot surprise an individual more than twice with the same marvel
Mark Twain
If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.
Mark Twain
It don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway.
Mark Twain
I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.
Mark Twain
My first semester I had only nine students. Hoping they might view me as professional and well prepared, I arrived bearing name tags fashioned in the shape of maple leaves.
David Sedaris
But music didn't make my mother nervous. She was more concerned about the agenda of women who thought it was a good idea to wear pastel, shoulder-padded suits while they all marched single file toward a better tomorrow.
Wayne Gladstone
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!-Incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea-and put him at the head of the procession.
Mark Twain
Faith is the soul riding at anchor.
Josh Billings
I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.
Mark Twain
Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.
David Sedaris
Ask a woman if she’s ambitious and she’ll look at you as if you just asked whether she sticks pins in puppies for fun. Ask a woman if she’s competitive and she’ll look at you as if you suggested that she’s a hooker.
Gina Barreca
You're only young once but you can always be immature.
Dave Barry
A holding company is the people you give your money to while you're being searched.
Will Rogers
One ought always to lie, when one can do good by it;
Mark Twain
It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
P.G. Wodehouse
I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules.
Mark Twain
Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.
Robert Benchley
As Shakespeare says, if you're going to do a thing you might as well pop right at it and get it over.
P.G. Wodehouse
You should not confuse your career with your life.
Dave Barry
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
[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.", Issue 64, Winter 1975)
P.G. Wodehouse
In your country and mine we should have the privilege of making fun of this kind of morality, but it would be unkind to do it here.Many of these people have the reasoning faculty, but no one uses it in religious matters.
Mark Twain
The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.
Mark Twain
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
Mark Twain
The snag in this business of falling in love, aged relative, is that the parties of the first part so often get mixed up with the wrong parties of the second part, robbed of their cooler judgement by the party of the second part's glamour. Put it like this: the male sex is divided into rabbits and non-rabbits and the female sex into dashers and dormice, and the trouble is that the male rabbit has a way of getting attracted by the female dasher (who would be fine for the non-rabbit) and realizing too late that he ought to have been concentrating on some mild, gentle dormouse with whom he could settle down peacefully and nibble lettuce.
P.G. Wodehouse
The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.
Leo. C Rosten
Let your boat of life be light packed only with what you need-a homely home and simple pleasures one or two friends worth the name someone to love and to love you a cat a dog enough to eat and enough to wear and a little more than enough to drink for thirst is a dangerous thing.
Jerome K. Jerome
Everyone is ignorant only on different subjects.
Will Rogers
Insanity is hereditary you get it from your children.
Sam Levenson
Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.
Mark Twain
The follies which a man regrets most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.
Helen Rowland
The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.
P.G. Wodehouse
Someone once told me that we move when it becomes less painful than staying where we are".
Anne Hines
If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks.
Mark Twain
Even if you're on the right track you'll get run over if you just sit there.
Will Rogers
I went to Maui to stay a week and remained five. I never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place goodbye so regretfully. I have not once thought of business, or care or human toil or trouble or sorrow or weariness, and the memory of it will remain with me always.
Mark Twain
Some people get an education without going to college. The rest get it after they get out.
Mark Twain
Worry compounds the futility of being trapped on a dead-end street. Thinking opens new avenues.
Cullen Hightower
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left and could say, I used everything you gave me.
Erma Bombeck
One of the Georges - I forget which - once said that a certain number of hours' sleep each night - I cannot recall at the moment how many - made a man something which for the time being has slipped my memory.
P.G. Wodehouse
The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people.
Mark Twain
You will be more disappointed in life by the things that you do not do than by the things that you do.
Mark Twain
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
Mark Twain
Even intellectuals should have learned by now that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs.
Roy Blount Jr.
Warm summer sun, shine brightly here, Warm Southern wind, blow softly here, Green sod above, lie light, lie light, Good night, dear heart; good night, good night.
Mark Twain
Had his brain been constructed of silk, he would have been hard put to it to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers.
P.G. Wodehouse
I hate computers. My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily. I’m comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind. I hate computers for getting their own section in the New York Times and for lengthening commercials with the mention of a Web site address. Who really wants to find out more about Procter & Gamble? Just buy the toothpaste or laundry detergent, and get on with it. I hate them for creating the word org and I hate them for e-mail, which isn’t real mail but a variation of the pointless notes people used to pass in class. I hate computers for replacing the card catalog in the New York Public Library and I hate the way they’ve invaded the movies. I’m not talking about their contribution to the world of special effects. I have nothing against a well-defined mutant or full-scale alien invasion — that’s good technology. I’m talking about their actual presence in any given movie. They’ve become like horses in a western — they may not be the main focus, but everybody seems to have one.
David Sedaris
It was a nasty look. It made me feel as if I were something the dog had brought in and intended to bury later on, when he had time.
P.G. Wodehouse
It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself but the most inconvenient one too.
Josh Billings
Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking.
Dave Barry
Evolution is a blind giant who rolls a snowball down a hill. The ball is made of flakes—circumstances. They contribute to the mass without knowing it. They adhere without intention, and without foreseeing what is to result. When they see the result they marvel at the monster ball and wonder how the contriving of it came to be originally thought out and planned. Whereas there was no such planning, there was only a law: the ball once started, all the circumstances that happened to lie in its path would help to build it, in spite of themselves.
Mark Twain
I said it was a brutal thing."No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it.
Mark Twain
If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings.
Dave Barry
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
Mark Twain
All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.
David Sedaris
Jim said he believed it was spirits, but I says: no, spirits wouldn't say "dern the dern fog".
Mark Twain
There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.
P.G. Wodehouse