Quotes by Humorists - Page 3

I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself.

David Sedaris

Now he found out a new thing--namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.

Mark Twain

Folks that blurt out just what they think wouldn't be so bad if they thought.

Kin Hubbard

It is so pleasant to come across people more stupid than ourselves. We love them at once for being so.

Jerome K. Jerome

Appearance, not reality, is what the clever dog grasps at in these clever days. We spurn the dull-brown solid earth; we build our lives and homes in the fair-seeming rainbow-land of shadow and chimera.

Jerome K. Jerome

Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.

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

Owl love you forever

David Sedaris

It is the bungled crime that brings remorse.

P.G. Wodehouse

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Mark Twain

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

Mark Twain

Man is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight

Mark Twain

To slur “feminism” into “humanism” is to usurp women’s voices once again, to make the singular feminine into the so-called universal masculine.

Gina Barreca

Yeah, but will it hurt?”’ I asked.“This is science, Zach,” Randy said, reassuringly, as he tilted my head back and lowered the lens to my eye. “Of course it will hurt.

John Zakour

Sometimes I wish we could hear of a country that’s out of kings.

Mark Twain

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

There is nothing so stupid as an educated man if you get off the thing that he was educated in.

Will Rogers

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

You bastard, stop that whistling and fight me like a man!

John Zakour

I read one psychologist's theory that said "Never strike a child in your anger." When could I strike him? When he is kissing me on my birthday? When he's recuperating from measles? Do I slap the Bible out of his hand on Sunday?

Erma Bombeck

Deep down in me I knowed it was a lie and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie-I found that out.

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

[T]he success of every novel -- if it's a novel of action -- depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, "What are my big scenes?" and then get every drop of juice out of them.", Issue 64, Winter 1975)

P.G. Wodehouse

In short, immaturity is spoiled. And what is spoiled doesn’t ripen. It goes bad early, gets bitter and withers on the vine.

Gina Barreca

The wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling.

Mark Twain

When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.

Mark Twain

You probably think that being a guest in your aunt's house I would hesitate to butter you all over the front lawn and dance on the fragments in hobnailed boots, but you are mistaken. It would be a genuine pleasure. By an odd coincidence I brought a pair of hobnailed boots with me!' So saying, and recognising a good exit line when he saw one, he strode out, and after an interval of tense meditation I followed him. (Spode to Wooster)

P.G. Wodehouse

Other useful commands to teach your dog are 'stay,' 'heel,' 'remove your snout from that person's groin,' 'stop humping the Barcalounger,' 'do not bark violently for two hours at inanimate objects such as a flowerpot,' ' do not eat poop,' and 'if you must eat poop, then at least refrain from licking my face afterward'.

Dave Barry

He couldn't get into Harvard even if he had the dean's wife at gunpoint.

Dave Barry

Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common-sense.

Helen Rowland

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

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

Mark Twain

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

My number one fear is heights. Well, not so much the heights but the falling from heights. Actually the falling isn’t that bad (I have a strong heart), it’s the sudden stops that are painful. Believe me — I experienced it once.

John Zakour

So, what you’re basically telling me is death is boring but no worse than hanging out with family.

John Zakour

The past is the tomorrow that got away.

Leonard L. Levinson

Feminine psychology is admittedly odd, sir. The poet Pope...""Never mind about the poet Pope, Jeeves.""No, sir.""There are times when one wants to hear all about the poet Pope and times when one doesn't.""Very true, sir.

P.G. Wodehouse

Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.

David Sedaris

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

Mark Twain

A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.

Mark Twain

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

It ain't so much trouble to get rich as it is to tell when we have got rich.

Josh Billings

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

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.

Mark Twain

I support gay marriage. I believe they have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us.

Kinky Friedman

Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress people that they don't like.

Will Rogers

In olden times sacrifices were made at the altar a custom which is still continued.

Helen Rowland

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

The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up.

Mark Twain

On my fifth trip to France I limited myself to the words and phrases that people actually use. From the dog owners I learned "Lie down," "Shut up," and "Who shit on this carpet?" The couple across the road taught me to ask questions correctly, and the grocer taught me to count. Things began to come together, and I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. "Is thems the thoughts of cows?" I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains displayed in the front window. "I want me some lamb chop with handles on 'em.

David Sedaris

...but wasn't everyone in England supposed to be a detective? Wasn't every crime, no matter how complex, solved in a timely fashion by either a professional or a hobbyist? That's the impression you get from British books and TV shows. Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hetty Wainthropp, Inspector George Gently: they come from every class and corner of the country. There's even Edith Pargeter's Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk who solved crimes in twelfth-century Shrewsbury. No surveillance cameras, no fingerprints, not even a telephone, and still he cracked every case that came his way.

David Sedaris

No thanks,” I answered, “I never take rides from strangers, thugs who've tried to kill me or people with poor personal hygiene. Congratulations, by the way, for being the first person to qualify in all three categories.

John Zakour

If you have the choice between humble and cocky, go with cocky. There's always time to be humble later, once you've been proven horrendously, irrevocably wrong.

Kinky Friedman

(Speaking of the Cistercian monks) A grim fraternity, passing grim lives in that sweet spot, that God had made so bright! Strange that Nature's voices all around them--the soft singing of the waters, the wisperings of the river grass, the music of the rushing wind--should not have taught them a truer meaning of life than this. They listened there, through the long days, in silence, waiting for a voice from heaven; and all day long and through the solemn night it spoke to them in myriad tones, and they heard it not.

Jerome K. Jerome

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

I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.

Mark Twain

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

Mark Twain

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

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Mark Twain

Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth.

Dave Barry

Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next