Quotes by American Authors - Page 145

Some of my best friends are illusions. Been sustaining me for years.
Sheila Ballantyne
Once you start asking questions innocence is gone.
Mary Astor
An impossibility does not disturb us until its accomplishment shows what fools we were.
Henry S. Haskins
Aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly but the bumble bee doesn't know it so it goes on flying anyway.
Mary Kay Ash
The young do not know enough to be prudent and therefore they attempt the impossible-and achieve it generation after generation.
Pearl S. Buck
The good thing about being young is that you are not experienced enough to know you cannot possibly do the things you are doing.
Gene Brown
The Wright brothers flew through the smoke screen of impossibility.
Dorothea Brande
Progress results only from the fact that there are some men and women who refuse to believe that what they know to be right cannot be done.
Russell W. Davenport
You can do one of two things just shut up which is something I don't find easy or learn an awful lot very fast which is what I tried to do.
Jane Fonda
all ignorance toboggans into know and trudges up to ignorance again.
E.E. Cummings
A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Everybody is ignorant only on different subjects.
Will Rogers
Ignoramus: a person unacquainted with certain kinds of knowledge familiar to yourself and having certain other kinds that you know nothing about.
Ambrose Bierce
The trouble ain't that people are ignorant: it's that they know so much that ain't so.
Josh Billings
To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.
Amos Bronson Alcott
There is more stupidity around than hydrogen and it has longer shelf life.
Frank Zappa
If I cannot brag of knowing something then I brag of not knowing it at any rate brag.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.
James Thurber
There is less leisure now than in the Middle Ages when one third of the year consisted of holidays and festivals.
Ralph Borsodi
More free time means more time to waste. The worker who used to have only a little time in which to get drunk and beat his wife now has time to get drunk beat his wife - and watch TV.
Robert M. Hutchins
Life is a zoo in a jungle.
Peter De Vries
It is only liquid currents of thought that move men and the world.
Wendell Phillips
An idea to be suggestive must come to the individual with the force of a revelation.
William James
Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men or they are no better than dreams.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The material universe exists only in the mind.
Jonathan Edwards
Great ideas originate in the muscles.
Thomas Edison
Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds. Remy de Gourmont An idea is salvation by imagination.
Frank Lloyd Wright
What's a cult? It just means not enough people to make a minority.
Robert Altman
Ideas as distinguished from events are never unprecedented.
Hannah Arendt
Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
There is no adequate defence except stupidity against the impact of a new idea.
Percy W. Bridgman
An idea is a feat of association and the height of it is a good metaphor.
Robert Frost
Every man with an idea has at least two or three followers.
Brooks Atkinson
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.
George Santayana
To say that an idea is fashionable is to say I think that it has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.
Murray Kempton
For parlour use the vague generality is a lifesaver.
George Ade
Reasons are whores.
Leonard Michaels
Extremes meet and there is no better example than the naughtiness of humility.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Remember this: If you work for a man in Heaven's name work for him. If he pays you wages which supply you bread and butter work for him speak well of him stand by the institution he represents. If put to a pinch an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness. If you must vilify condemn and eternally disparage - resign your position and when you are on the outside damn to your heart's content but as long as you are part of the institution do not condemn it.
Elbert Hubbard
A man should be taller older heavier uglier and hoarser than his wife.
E.W. Howe
An empty stomach is not a good political adviser.
Albert Einstein
We are all here for a spell get all the good laughs you can.
Will Rogers
Laughter is the sensation of feeling good all over and showing it principally in one spot.
Josh Billings
The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.
Lenny Bruce
The great humorist forgets himself in his delighted contemplation of other people.
Douglas Bush
Humour is just another defence against the universe.
Mel Brooks
If there's anything I hate it's the word humorist - I feel like countering with the word seriousist.
Peter De Vries
Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
Victor Borge
The ability to laugh at life is right at the top with love and communication in the hierarchy of our needs. Humour has much to do with pain it exaggerates the anxieties and absurdities we feel so that we gain distance and through laughter relief.
Sara Davidson
Comedy is tragedy - plus time.
Carol Burnett
Humour is the most engaging cowardice. With it myself I have been able to hold some of my enemy in play far out of gunshot.
Robert Frost
Humour is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention. But it has no persuasive value at all.
J. K. Galbraith
Humour can be dissected as a frog can but the thing dies in the process.
E B White
Novelist Peter de Vries like Adlai Stevenson and Mark Twain has suffered from the American assumption that anyone with a sense of humour is not to be taken seriously.
Timothy Foote
Mirthfulness is in the mind and you cannot get it out. It is just as good in its place as conscience or veneration.
Henry Ward Beecher
Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So for every ten Jews beating their breasts God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.
Mel Brooks
Wit is the only wall Between us and the dark.
Mark Van Doren
Humour plays close to the big hot fire which is the truth and the reader feels the heat.
E B White
A humorist is a man who feels bad but who feels good about it.
Don Herold
Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.
James Thurber