Quotes by Humorists - Page 17

The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two.
Mark Twain
Lord Emsworth belonged to the people-like-to-be-left-alone-to-amuse-themselves-when-they-come-to-a-place school of hosts
P.G. Wodehouse
The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French.
Mark Twain
One year I went as a pirate, but from then on I went as a hobo. It's a word you don't hear anymore. Along with 'tramp,' it's been replaced by 'homeless person,' which isn't the same thing. Unlike someone who was evicted or lost his house in a fire, the hobo roughed it by choice. Being at liberty, unencumbered by bills and mortgages, better suited his drinking schedule, and so he found shelter wherever he could, never a bum, but something much less threatening, a figure of merriment, almost.
David Sedaris
She gave me another of those long keen looks, and I could see that she was again asking herself if her favourite nephew wasn't steeped to the tonsils in the juice of the grape.
P.G. Wodehouse
I could still see that Pauline was one of the most beautiful girls I had ever met, but of the ancient fire which had caused me to bung my heart at her feet that night at the Plaza there remained not a trace. Analysing this, if analyzing is the word I want, I came to the conclusion that this changed outlook was due to the fact that she was so dashed dynamic. Unquestionably an eyeful, Pauline Stoker had the grave defect of being one of those girls who want you to come and swim a mile before breakfast and rout you out when you are trying to snatch a wink of sleep after lunch for a merry five sets of tennis.
P.G. Wodehouse
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
Mark Twain
He done his level best.Was he a mining on the flat..He done it with a zest..Was he a leading of the choir..He done his level best.If he'd a reg'lar task to do,He never took no rest..Or if 'twas off and on the same..He done his level best.If he was preachin' on his beat,He'd tramp from east to west,And north to south ..in cold and heat..He done his level best.He'd Yank a sinner outen (Hades),And land him with the blest;Then snatch a prayer'n waltz in again,And do his level best.He'd cuss and sing and howl and pray,And dance and drink and jest,He done his level best.Whate'er this man was sot to doHe done it with a zest;No matter what his contract was,He'd do his level best...
Mark Twain
If only, I thought, I could talk to Eugene just one more time. This was before I came to understand that you cannot make someone fall in love with you But here's what you can do. By arguing and pleading and screaming and crying and throwing plates and phoning a lot and bringing hot food and sending flowers and buying gifts and doing unsolicited favors and remembering a birthday and being nice and declaring your abiding love and trying hard or sometimes merely by being present, you can make someone who was hitherto lukewarm really detest you.
Patricia Marx
The stork is voiceless because there is really nothing to say.
Will Cuppy
In Russia, as I sat there day after day wearing headphones, listening to the interpreter struggle to make our words relevant, I wondered if we could establish meaningful rapport with a nation that had never seen raisins dance in dark glasses on TV...never had a garage sale.
Erma Bombeck
It would take more than long-stemmed roses to change my view that you're a despicable cowardy custard and a disgrace to a proud family. Your ancestors fought in the Crusades and were often mentioned in despatches, and you cringe like a salted snail at the thought of appearing as Santa Claus before an audience of charming children who wouldn't hurt a fly. It's enough to make an aunt turn her face to the wall and give up the struggle.
P.G. Wodehouse
But if I hadn't shoved you off the boat back there,you'd be lost at sea now,wouldn't you? We'd all be lost! So thanks to me you're all standing on land."(Pirates, its a good thing they're idiots)
Dave Barry
One never realizes how different a husband and wife can be until they begin to pack for a trip.
Erma Bombeck
For people who like that kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they like.
Artemus Ward
All of us are born with a set of instinctive fears - of falling, of the dark, of lobsters, of falling on lobsters in the dark, of speaking before a Rotary Club, and of the words "Some Assembly Required".
Dave Barry
It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt
Mark Twain
Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
Erma Bombeck
I always advise people never to give advice.
P.G. Wodehouse
Human nature, at its best, had always been based on a deep heroic restlessness, on wanting something--something else, something more, whether it be true love or a glimpse just beyond the horizon. It was the promise of happiness, not the attainment of it, that had driven the entire engine, the folly and glory of who we are.
Will Ferguson
As our means increase, so do our desires;and we ever stand midway between the two.
Jerome K. Jerome
Don't worry about who doesn't like you, who has more, or who's doing what.
Erma Bombeck
I hoped our lives would continue this way forever, but inevitably the past came knocking. Not the good kind that was collectible but the bad kind that had arthritis.
David Sedaris
The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.
Mark Twain
Don’t you realize the Internet is just a way for millions of sad people to be completely alone together?
Wayne Gladstone
If you think it ain’t dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way, by yourself, in the night, you try it once – you’ll see.
Mark Twain
Be good and you will be lonesome.
Mark Twain
The Indian may seem poor to we rich Westerners but in matters of the spirit it is we who are the paupers and they who are millionaires.
Mark Twain
I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.
Mark Twain
It reflects like an optical instrument and responds to changes in the weather so sensitively that it seems like a part of the sky rather than of the land. And along with all that, Baikal is distinctly Asiatic: if a camel caravan could somehow transport Baikal across Siberia to Europe, and curious buyers unwrapped it in a marketplace, none would mistake it for a lake from around there.
Ian Frazier
Sometimes travel is merely an opportunity taken when you can.
Ian Frazier
Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.
Mark Twain
Travel is fatal to narrowmindedness, prejudice and bigotry.
Mark Twain
It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something's said by a stranger I've been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, "Listen. I'm with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election.
David Sedaris
It was such ecstacy to dream, and dream - till you got a bite.A scorpion bite. Then the first duty was to get up out of the grass and kill the scorpion; and the next to bathe the bitten place with alcohol or brandy; and the next to resolve to keep out of the grass in the future. Then came an adjournment to the bedchamber and the pastime of writing up the day's journal with one hand and the destruction of mosquitoes with the other - a whole community of them at a slap. Then, observing an enemy approaching - a hairy tarantula on stilts - why not set the spittoon on him? It is done, and the projecting ends of his paws give a luminous idea of the magnitude of his reach. Then to bed and become a promenade for a centipede with forty-two legs on a side and every foot hot enough to burn a whole through a raw-hide. More soaking with alcohol, and a resolution to examine the bed before entering it, in future. Then wait, and suffer, till all the mosquitoes in the neighborhood have crawled in under the bar, then slip out quickly, shut them in and sleep peacefully on the floor till morning. Meantime, it is comforting to curse the tropics in occasional wakeful intervals.
Mark Twain
He has a passport," my classmates would whisper. "Quick, let's run before he judges us!
David Sedaris
One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.
Mark Twain
Streets flooded. Please advise.
Robert Benchley
The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I have finished my travels.
Mark Twain
We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can "show off" and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off.
Mark Twain
People are often frightened of Parisians, but an American in Paris will find no harsher critic than another American.
David Sedaris
Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?
Erma Bombeck
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.
Mark Twain
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain
He was always in a sort of fever because he was dropping behind schedule with his daily acts of kindness. However hard he tried, he'd fall behind; and then you would find him prowling about the house, setting such a clip to try and catch up with himself that Easeby was rapidly becoming a perfect hell for man and beast.
P.G. Wodehouse
For he did not seem to know any way to do a person a kindness but by killing him.
Mark Twain
The music of life would be mute if the chords of memory were snapped asunder.
Jerome K. Jerome
I went to Maui to stay a week and remained five. I never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place goodbye so regretfully. I have not once thought of business, or care or human toil or trouble or sorrow or weariness, and the memory of it will remain with me always.
Mark Twain
Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds.
Mark Twain
Dates are hard to remember because they consist of figures; figures are monotonously unstriking in appearance, and they don't take hold, they form no pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to help. Pictures are the thing. Pictures can make dates stick.
Mark Twain
I asked her, dreamily, if we had met, and when she told me that we had not, I gave her a little finger wave, the type a leprechaun might offer a pixie who was floating by on a maple leaf. "Well, hi there," I whispered.
David Sedaris
Was I the only one who became unsettled and swoonish at the sight of a large, inverted carcass hanging from a tree, its vital organs strewn about like children's toys, the occasional pack of hunting dogs fighting over a lung, another one looking for a quiet place to enjoy the severed head? It happened all the time and nobody else seemed bothered. People just walked up to the bloody carcasses and carried on entirely normal conversations, as though a man wasn't standing there squeezing deer feces out of a large intestine and small children weren't playing football with a liver.
Harrison Scott Key
During the gold rush its a good time to be in the pick and shovel business
Mark Twain
Stimulated by the juice, I believe, men have even been known to ride alligators.
P.G. Wodehouse
Results for "A man is like a cat; chase him and he'll run; sit still and ignore him and he'll come purring at your feet
Helen Rowland
A woman's flattery may inflate a man's head a little; but her criticism goes straight to his heart, and contracts it so that it can never again hold quite as much love for her.
Helen Rowland
Would it not be downright cruel to keep him in semi-captivity in a town or city, where the opportunities for wreaking havoc and destruction upon the landscape are necessarily so limited? In a word, is it right to attract Wombats?
Will Cuppy
I look in the glass sometimes at my two long, cylindrical bags (so picturesquely rugged about the knees), my stand-up collar and billycock hat, and wonder what right I have to go about making God's world hideous. Then wild and wicked thoughts come into my heart. I don't want to be good and respectable. (I never can be sensible, I'm told; so that don't matter.) I want to put on lavender-colored tights, with red velvet breeches and a green doublet slashed with yellow; to have a light-blue silk cloak on my shoulder, and a black eagle's plume waving from my hat, and a big sword, and a falcon, and a lance, and a prancing horse, so that I might go about and gladden the eyes of the people. Why should we all try to look like ants crawling over a dust-heap? Why shouldn't we dress a little gayly? I am sure if we did we should be happier. True, it is a little thing, but we are a little race, and what is the use of our pretending otherwise and spoiling fun? Let philosophers get themselves up like old crows if they like. But let me be a butterfly.
Jerome K. Jerome
Do I know you? I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I’ve lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man’s a coward.
Mark Twain
Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious.
P.G. Wodehouse