Humour & Wit Quotes — page 10

For after the rain when with never a stain The pavilion of Heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain,

Truly … as accidental as my Life may be, or as that random Humour is, which governs it; I know nothing, after all, so real or substantial as My-Self. Therefore if there be that Thing you call a Substance, I take for granted I am one. But …

Then let us love one another and laugh. Time passes, and we shall soon laugh no longer—and meanwhile common living is a burden, and earnest men are in siege upon us all around. Let us suffer absurdities, for this is only to suffer one …

In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal and so ill-bred, as audible laughter.

The severe Schools shall never laugh me out of the Philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible.

For he could coin, or counterfeit New words, with little or no wit; Words so debas'd and hard, no stone Was hard enough to touch them on; And when with hasty noise he spoke 'em; The ignorant for current took 'em;

I hate and despise a shrewish suspicion of foreigners and foreign ways; a man who can look me in the face, laugh with me, speak truth and deal fairly, is my brother, though his skin is as black as ink or as yellow as an evening primrose.

The Afghan looks upon an Englishman in two lights—first, as a person who is an infidel, and next as a person who has money. In the first character he is anxious to kill him, in the second he is anxious to rifle him. (Cheers and laughter.)

If those extra-social brains are so potent, why after all do they effect so little? A dull police-officer, with the machine behind him, can afford to laugh at most experiments in anarchy.

If your wife gives you her heart, you must take it, thankfully, and use it well, and not pull it in pieces, and laugh in her face, because she cannot snatch it away.

As a wit, if not first, in the very first line.

Merriment is always the effect of a sudden impression. The jest which is expected is already destroyed.

All laws for the purpose of making man worship God, are born of the same spirit that kindled the fires of the auto da fe, and lovingly built the dungeons of the Inquisition.

903. Better have an old Man to humour, than a young Rake to break your Heart.

Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor …

Bot for men sein, and soth it is, That who that al of wisdom writ It dulleth ofte a mannes wit To him that schal it aldai rede, For thilke cause, if that ye rede, I wolde go the middel weie

Methinks, I see the wanton houres flee, And as they passe, turne back and laugh at me.

So, when my Days of Impotence approach, And I'm by Pox and Wine's unlucky chance Driv'n from the pleasing Billows of debauch On the dull Shore of lazy Temperance;My Pains at least some Respite shall afford While I behold the Battles you …

This view of the case amused Esther for a time, but not for long — the matter was too serious for any treatment but a joke, and joking made it more serious still.

A joke's a very serious thing.

A man of remarkable genius may afford to pass by a piece of wit, if it happens to border on abuse. A little genius is obliged to catch at every witticism indiscriminately.

Humor is doubtless intended as the safety-valve of concentrative minds, and its prevalence, in the English race, is owing to their reserve of character, which finds no vent through a mercurial temperament like the French and Italians.

If you give a jest, take one. Let all your jokes be truly jokes. Jesting sometimes ends in sad earnest.

Not that the moderns are born with more wit than their predecessors, but, finding the world better furnished at their coming into it, they have more leisure for new thoughts, more light to direct them, and more hints to work upon.