Quotes by Authors - Page 151

Extreme busyness whether at school or college kirk or market is a symptom of deficient vitality and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Any fool can be fussy and rid himself of energy all over the place but a man has to have something in him before he can settle down to do nothing.
J.B. Priestley
There is less leisure now than in the Middle Ages when one third of the year consisted of holidays and festivals.
Ralph Borsodi
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
Jerome K. Jerome
Life is a zoo in a jungle.
Peter De Vries
Big ideas are so hard to recognize so fragile so easy to kill. Don't forget that all of you who don't have them.
John Elliott
Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds. Remy de Gourmont An idea is salvation by imagination.
Frank Lloyd Wright
A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.
Jules Renard
No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
Every time a man puts a new idea across he finds ten men who thought of it before he did - but they only thought of it.
Anonymous
Great ideas are not charitable.
Henry de Montherlant
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
I hope you have not been leading a double life pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
Oscar Wilde
Saint abroad and a devil at home.
John Bunyan
There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has the right to blame us.
Oscar Wilde
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile - hoping it will eat him last.
Winston Churchill
It is a trick among the dishonest to offer sacrifices that are not needed or not possible to avoid making those that are required.
Ivan Goncharov
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
Samuel Butler
A man should be taller older heavier uglier and hoarser than his wife.
E.W. Howe
All husbands are alike but they have different faces so you can tell them apart.
Anonymous
The love of truth lies at the root of much humour.
Robertson Davies
Charles Dickens' creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say it in all seriousness - than Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.
Stephen Leacock
One loses so many laughs by not laughing at oneself.
Sara Jeannette Duncan
He who laughs lasts.
Anonymous
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
Wit is far more often a shield than a lance.
Anonymous
Any man will admit if need be that his sight is not good or that he cannot swim or shoots badly with a rifle but to touch upon his sense of humour is to give him mortal affront.
Stephen Leacock
You encourage a comic man too much and he gets silly.
Stephen Leacock
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
Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.
Karl Barth
Humour is the contemplation of the finite from the point of view of the infinite.
Christian Morgenstern
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
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
Humour plays close to the big hot fire which is the truth and the reader feels the heat.
E B White
The best definition of humour I know is: humour may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life and the artistic expression thereof. I think this is the best I know because I wrote it myself.
Stephen Leacock
Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.
James Thurber
A satirist is a man who discovers unpleasant things about himself and then says them about other people.
Peter McArthur
The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
John Updike
Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
Virginia Woolf
There are no perfect people - except of course my wife's first husband.
Anonymous
I've always been well liked. I was so popular in school everybody hated me.
Anonymous
Golf and sex: Two things you can really enjoy without being that good at them.
Anonymous
Leisure time is when your wife can't find you
Anonymous
I didn't want to pray to God 'cause I didn't want him to know where I was.
Marsha Dobb
B.I.B.L.E. = Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.
Anonymous
I wanted to become an atheist but I gave it up. They have no holidays.
Henny Youngman
You want to make God laugh? Tell him your future plans.
Woody Allen
If you talk to God you are praying if God talks to you you have schizophrenia.
Thomas Szasz
Before I started working here I drank smoked and used bad language. Thanks to this job I now have good reason.
Anonymous
A secretary must think like a man act like a lady look like a girl and work like a dog.
Anonymous
When people ask me if I have any spare change I tell them I have it at home in my spare wallet.
Nick Arnette
Flying from the U.S. to Tokyo takes approximately as long as law school.
Dave Barry
Miami bumper sticker: My horn is broken-so watch for my finger.
Anonymous
Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for movie stars.
Fred Allen
My wife loves Europe but to me it's a bad day at a theme park.
Jay Leno
If you want to know how old a woman is . . . ask her sister-in-law.
Edgar Howe