Quotes by Humorists - Page 14

You can survive up to three weeks without food. You can only survive for three days without water. No one knows how many days you can survive without caffeine.
Andrew Shaffer
Maybe not, maybe not. Cheer up, Becky, and let's go on trying.
Mark Twain
If girls realized their responsibilities they would be so careful when they smiled that they would probably abandon the practice altogether. There are moments in a man's life when a girl's smile can have as important results as an explosion of dynamite.
P.G. Wodehouse
If you haven't seen your wife smile at a traffic cop, you haven't seen her smile her prettiest.
Kin Hubbard
My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
Mark Twain
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
...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
It is the bungled crime that brings remorse.
P.G. Wodehouse
The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it.
Arnold H. Glasgow
We don not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when the glare, and the the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom pageants of an age that has passed away.
Mark Twain
There isn’t a parallel of latitude but thinks it would have been the equator if it had had its rights.
Mark Twain
Why, human thought is a real element, a real force, darting out like electricity from every man's or woman's mind, injuring or relieving, killing or curing, building fortunes or tearing them down, working for good or ill, every moment, night or day, asleep or awake, carving, moulding and shaping people's faces and making them ugly or agreeable.
Prentice Mulford
If you're in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it'll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.
Jack Handey
You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.
Erma Bombeck
Call me a proud American, if you want, but I truly believe that no other nation on Earth possesses the capabilities to put on a more powerful display of underwater mermaid patriotism.
Dave Barry
We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it.
Dave Barry
It's safe to assume that by 2085 guns will be sold in vending machines but you won't be able to smoke anywhere in America.
David Sedaris
Looking' his last' upon the scene of his former joys and his later sufferings, and wishing 'she' could see him now, abroad on the wild sea, facing peril and death with a dauntless heart, going to his doom with a grim smile on his lips.
Mark Twain
In one terrible instant, that terrible thing happened, the single most tragic experience of my, and just about any, childhood: boredom.
Harrison Scott Key
The darling mispronunciations of childhood! - dear me, there's no music that can touch it; and how one grieves when it wastes away and dissolves into correctness, knowing it will never visit his bereaved ear again.
Mark Twain
A solemn sadness reigns. A great peace is around us. In its light our cares of the working day grow small and trivial, and bread and cheese—ay, and even kisses—do not seem the only things worth striving for. Thoughts we cannot speak but only listen to flood in upon us, and standing in the stillness under earth's darkening dome, we feel that we are greater than our petty lives. Hung round with those dusky curtains, the world is no longer a mere dingy workshop, but a stately temple wherein man may worship, and where at times in the dimness his groping hands touch God's.
Jerome K. Jerome
And what does it amount to?" said Satan, with his evil chuckle. "Nothing at all. You gain nothing; you always come out where you went in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating itself and monotonously reperforming this dull nonsense--to what end? No wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel defiled if you touched them; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not ashamed of it, but proud; whose existence is a perpetual insult to you and you are afraid to resent it; who are mendicants supported by your alms, yet assume toward you the airs of benefactor toward beggar; who address you in the language of master to slave, and are answered in the language of slave to master; who are worshiped by you with your mouth, while in your heart--if you have one--you despise yourselves for it. The first man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities which have not yet failed in his line; it is the foundation upon which all civilizations have been built.
Mark Twain
But that is the way we are made: we don't reason, where we feel; we just feel.
Mark Twain
I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.
Mark Twain
A few fly bites cannot stop a spirited horse.
Mark Twain
NOTICEPersons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.BY ORDER OF THE AUTHORPer G.G.,Chief of Ordnance
Mark Twain
I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.
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
P.G. Wodehouse
Most times, my mind is just an ongoing, present-tense, first-person monologue. It's like I'm writing a novel, constantly, but only in my brain.
Andrew Shaffer
Most times, my mind is just an ongoing, present-tense, first-person monologue. It's like I'm writing a novel.
Andrew Shaffer
Tom Sawyer the Pirate looked around upon the envying juveniles about him and confessed in his heart that this was the proudest moment of his life.
Mark Twain
Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.
P.G. Wodehouse
Speaking up is important. Yet to speak up without listening is like banging pots and pans together: Even if it gets you attention, it’s not going to get you respect.
Gina Barreca
You know, kid, ethics isn't about choosing between right and wrong; it's about choosing between grey and grey. It's about choosing between two equally desirable but mutually exclusive courses of action. Freedom or security? Courage or comfort? Self-examination or blissful happiness? Column A or Column B?
Will Ferguson
Ah, those foolish days, those foolish days when we were unselfish and pure-minded; those foolish days when our simple hearts were full of truth, and faith, and reverence! Ah, those foolish days of noble longings and of noble strivings! And oh, these wise, clever days when we know that money is the only prize worth striving for, when we believe in nothing else but meanness and lies, when we care for no living creature but ourselves!
Jerome K. Jerome
I am strongly of the opinion that, after the age of twenty-one, a man ought not to be out of bed and awake at four in the morning. The hour breeds thought. At twenty-one, life being all future, it may be examined with impunity. But, at thirty, having become an uncomfortable mixture of future and past, it is a thing to be looked at only when the sun is high and the world full of warmth and optimism.
P.G. Wodehouse
Truth is stranger than fiction...
Mark Twain
She said all a body would have to do there [Heaven] was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever.
Mark Twain
What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!
Mark Twain
Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
Mark Twain
A home without a cat — and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat — may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?
Mark Twain
But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.
Mark Twain
I can last two months on a good compliment.
Mark Twain
Like it! Yes—the way I'd like a hot stove if I was to set on it long enough. No, Tom, I won't be rich, and I won't live in them cussed smothery houses. I like the woods, and the river, and hogsheads, and I'll stick to 'em, too.
Mark Twain
Distance lends enchantment to the view.
Mark Twain
The best things in life aren't things.
Art Buchwald
Until we’re pushing up daisies, it might be good to remind ourselves daily that everything’s coming up roses — for me and for you.
Gina Barreca
Stories are meant to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.
Finley Peter Dunne
Work like you don't need the money. Dance like no one is watching. And love like you've never been hurt.
Mark Twain
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
Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on 'The Survival of the Fittest.' These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.
Mark Twain
I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the “lower animals” (so-called,) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.
Mark Twain
There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.
Mark Twain
Why does a man take it for granted that a girl who flirts with him wants him to kiss her - when, nine times out of ten, she only wants him to want to kiss her?
Helen Rowland
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d druther not.
Mark Twain
As a child, I was more afraid of tetanus shots than, for example, Dracula.
Dave Barry
I always take Scotch whiskey at night as a preventive of toothache. I have never had the toothache; and what is more, I never intend to have it.
Mark Twain
If you read someone else's diary, you get what you deserve.
David Sedaris
I liked making people laugh, and I decided I was an atheist early on. My Dad was all right with that. We argued about it all the time, but it was good-natured. He was the most open-minded human being I've ever known.
Dave Barry
If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks.
Mark Twain