Quotes by Humorists - Page 23

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
Mark Twain
If you have the choice between humble and cocky, go with cocky. There's always time to be humble later, once you've been proven horrendously, irrevocably wrong.
Kinky Friedman
A friend doesn't go on a diet because you are fat.
Erma Bombeck
The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
Mark Twain
By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity – another man’s, I mean.
Mark Twain
Always drink upstream from the herd.
Will Rogers
This was not Aunt Dahlia, my good and kindly aunt, but my Aunt Agatha, the one who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth.
P.G. Wodehouse
The trouble with aggressive nonsmokers is that they feel they are doing you a favor by not allowing you to smoke. They seem to think that one day you'll look back and thank them for those precious fifteen seconds they just added to your life. What they don't understand is that those are just fifteen more seconds you can spend hating their guts and plotting revenge.
David Sedaris
I support gay marriage. I believe they have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us.
Kinky Friedman
Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.
Mark Twain
I hate you' she said to me one afternoon. 'I really, really hate you.' Call me sensitive, but I couldn't help but take it personally.
David Sedaris
Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking.
Dave Barry
Never miss a good chance to shut up.
Will Rogers
-'What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?'There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter
P.G. Wodehouse
What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.
Mark Twain
It was a bitter moment for us. We weren't two mature parents. We were just two kids playing grown-up. We still needed Mommy and Daddy's permission, blessings, and money to survive.
Erma Bombeck
When a girl uses six derogatory adjectives in her attempt to paint the portrait of the loved one, it means something. One may indicate a merely temporary tiff. Six is big stuff.
P.G. Wodehouse
The best baby-sitters, of course, are the baby’s grandparents. You feel completely comfortable entrusting your baby to them for long periods, which is why most grandparents flee to Florida.
Dave Barry
Never let your education interfere with your learning.
Mark Twain
Ah, heavens and earth, friend, if you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your life, you could not have graduated with higher honor that you could to-day.
Mark Twain
Some people get an education without going to college. The rest get it after they get out.
Mark Twain
I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other.
Mark Twain
Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.
Mark Twain
Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
Mark Twain
When asked "What do we need to learn this for?" any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness.
David Sedaris
When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.
Mark Twain
Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.
Mark Twain
Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.
Mark Twain
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Mark Twain
Even if you are on the right track, but just sit there, you will still get run over.
Will Rogers
Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.
Arnold H. Glasow
Success does not consist in never making blunders, but in never making the same one a second time.
Josh Billings
If you want to be successful, it's just this simple. Know what you are doing. Love what you are doing. And believe in what you are doing.
Will Rogers
The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking spaces.
Will Rogers
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
Mark Twain
That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.
Mark Twain
The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. I would not interfere with any one's religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. I am not able to believe one's religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion may be. But it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life--hence it is a valuable possession to him.
Mark Twain
I'm dating myself, but this was before Jesus Christ. We worshiped a God named Sashatiba, who had five eyes, including one on the Adam's apple.
David Sedaris
It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and honor king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honor the lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him! Why, dear me, ANY kind of royalty, howsoever modified, ANY kind of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself, and don't believe it when somebody else tells you. It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always figured as its aristocracies -- a company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions... The truth was, the nation as a body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before king and Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and postures of adulation that they might walk in pride and think themselves the gods of this world. And for all this, the thanks they got were cuffs and contempt; and so poor-spirited were they that they took even this sort of attention as an honor.
Mark Twain
Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.
Mark Twain
He die one day, and then he go above of my head to live with your father."He weared the long hair, and after he died, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples."He nice, the Jesus.
David Sedaris
When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.
Mark Twain
There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.
David Sedaris
The rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate.
David Sedaris
Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion--several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven....The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste.
Mark Twain
A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.
Mark Twain
In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.
Mark Twain
Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.
Mark Twain
but I have no mind for business and considered staying awake to be enough of an accomplishment.
David Sedaris
A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.
Robert Benchley
The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good.
P.G. Wodehouse
The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries.
Mark Twain
I never feel really comfortable unless I am either actually writing or have a story going. I could not stop writing.
P.G. Wodehouse
My Aunt Dahlia, who runs a woman's paper called Milady's Boudoir, had recently backed me into a corner and made me promise to write her a few words for her "Husbands and Brothers" page on "What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing". I believe in encouraging aunts, when deserving; and, as there are many worse eggs than her knocking about the metrop, I had consented blithely. But I give you my honest word that if I had had the foggiest notion of what I was letting myself in for, not even a nephew's devotion would have kept me from giving her the raspberry. A deuce of a job it had been, taxing the physique to the utmost. I don't wonder now that all these author blokes have bald heads and faces like birds who have suffered.
P.G. Wodehouse
Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.
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 them.", Issue 64, Winter 1975)
P.G. Wodehouse
To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
Mark Twain
...there was practically one handwriting common to the whole school when it came to writing lines. It resembled the movements of a fly that had fallen into an ink-pot, and subsequently taken a little brisk exercise on a sheet of foolscap by way of restoring the circulation.
P.G. Wodehouse
The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
Leo Rosten
How anybody can compose a story by word of mouth face to face with a bored-looking secretary with a notebook is more than I can imagine. Yet many authors think nothing of saying, 'Ready, Miss Spelvin? Take dictation. Quote no comma Sir Jasper Murgatroyd comma close quotes comma said no better make it hissed Evangeline comma quote I would not marry you if you were the last person on earth period close quotes Quote well comma I'm not so the point does not arise comma close quotes replied Sir Jasper twirling his moustache cynically period And so the long day wore on period End of chapter.'If I had to do that sort of thing I should be feeling all the time that the girl was saying to herself as she took it down, 'Well comma this beats me period How comma with homes for the feebleminded touting for custom on every side comma has a man like this succeeded in remaining at large mark of interrogation.
P.G. Wodehouse