Quotes by Humorists

Many a man that couldn't direct ye to th' drug store on th' corner when he was thirty will get a respectful hearin' when age has further impaired his mind.
Finley Peter Dunne
Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It's gossip
Erma Bombeck
Rumor travels faster, but it don't stay put as long as truth.
Will Rogers
What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words -- 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man -- the biography of the man himself cannot be written.
Mark Twain
It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch one another and find sympathy. We differ widely enough in our nobler qualities. It is in our follies that we are at one.
Jerome K. Jerome
In Paris the cashiers sit rather than stand. They run your goods over a scanner, tally up the price, and then ask you for exact change. The story they give is that there aren't enough euros to go around. "The entire EU is short on coins."And I say, "Really?" because there are plenty of them in Germany. I'm never asked for exact change in Spain or Holland or Italy, so I think the real problem lies with the Parisian cashiers, who are, in a word, lazy. Here in Tokyo they're not just hard working but almost violently cheerful. Down at the Peacock, the change flows like tap water. The women behind the registers bow to you, and I don't mean that they lower their heads a little, the way you might if passing someone on the street. These cashiers press their hands together and bend from the waist. Then they say what sounds to me like "We, the people of this store, worship you as we might a god.
David Sedaris
I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.
P.G. Wodehouse
T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.
Mark Twain
T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
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
Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.
Mark Twain
When I was a boy of fourteen my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
Mark Twain
When I was younger I could remember anything whether it had happened or not.
Mark Twain
I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.
Mark Twain
When you put down the good things you ought to have done and leave out the bad things you did do - well that's memoirs.
Will Rogers
It is the little things that fret and worry us you can dodge an elephant but not a fly.
Josh Billings
There are people who are always anticipating trouble and in this way they manage to enjoy many sorrows that never really happen.
Josh Billings
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles but most of them never happened.
Mark Twain
Worry compounds the futility of being trapped on a dead-end street. Thinking opens new avenues.
Cullen Hightower
You'll break the worry habit the day you decide you can meet and master the worse that can happen to you.
Arnold Glasow
There are two days in the week about which and upon which I never worry. ... One of these days is Yesterday ... And the other day I do not worry about is Tomorrow.
Robert Jones Burdette
I like work it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.
Jerome K. Jerome
Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
Mark Twain
Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.
Mark Twain
Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.
Robert Benchley
I want a house that has gotten over all its troubles I don't want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.
Jerome K. Jerome
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
Jerome K. Jerome
Most people like hard work particularly when they're paying for it.
Franklin P. Jones
In certain trying circumstances urgent circumstances desperate circumstances profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.
Mark Twain
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
Mark Twain
There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say "Yes I've got dreams of course I've got dreams." Then they put the box away and bring it out once in a while to look in it and yep they're still there. These are great dreams but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line to hold them up and say "How good or how bad am I?" That's where courage comes in.
Erma Bombeck
I don't know of anything better than a woman if you want to spend money where it will show.
Kin Hubbard
If a woman likes another woman she's cordial. If she doesn't like her she's very cordial.
Irvin S. Cobb
Housework is what woman does that nobody notices unless she hasn't done it.
Evan Esar
Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.
Mark Twain
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stovelid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again - and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
Mark Twain
Oh what a blamed uncertain thing This pesky weather is It blew and snew and then it thew And now by jing it's friz.
Philander Johnson
I wish to become rich so that I can instruct the people and glorify honest poverty a little like those kind-hearted fat benevolent people do.
Mark Twain
I am opposed to millionaires but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.
Mark Twain
I have too much respect for the truth to drag it out on every trifling occasion.
Mark Twain
Everyone is ignorant only on different subjects.
Will Rogers
Vice goes a long way tow'rd makin' life bearable. A little vice now an' thin is relished by th' best iv men.
Finley Peter Dunne
Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.
Don Herold
As scarce as truth is the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
Josh Billings
If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.
Mark Twain
Travel is ninety per cent anticipation and ten per cent recollection.
Edward Streeter
There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land again after a cheerful careless voyage.
Mark Twain
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
Mark Twain
Travel is fatal to prejudice bigotry and narrow-mindedness.
Mark Twain
Folks that blurt out just what they think wouldn't be so bad if they thought.
Kin Hubbard
Th' prisidincy is th' highest office in th' gift iv th people. Th' vice-prisidincy is th' next highest an' the lowest. It isn't a crime exactly. Ye can't be sint to jail f r it but it's a kind iv a disgrace.
Finley Peter Dunne
Whether it's the best of times or the worst of times it's the only time we've got.
Art Buchwald
The past is the tomorrow that got away.
Leonard L. Levinson
There are two days about which nobody should ever worry and these are yesterday and tomorrow.
Robert Jones Burdette
The fellow that owns his own home is always just coming out of a hardware store.
Kin Hubbard
I want a house that has got over all its troubles I don't want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.
Jerome K. Jerome
That kind of so-called housekeeping where they have six Bibles and no cork-screw.
Mark Twain
A good storyteller is a person who has a good memory and hopes other people haven't.
Irvin S. Cobb
Adam was the only man who when he said a good thing knew that nobody had said it before him.
Mark Twain
There are several good protections against temptation but the surest is cowardice.
Mark Twain