102 quotes
Whenever you find Humor, you find Pathos close by its side.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
The minister’s brain is often the “poor-box” of the church.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
From Lucifer to Jerry Sneak there is not an aspect of evil, imperfection, and littleness which can elude the lights of humor or the lightning of wit.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Mirth is a Proteus, changing its shape and manner with the thousand diversities of individual character, from the most superfluous gayety to the deepest, most earnest humor.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Wit, bright, rapid, and blasting as the lightning, flashes, strikes, and vanishes, in an instant; humor, warm and all-embracing as the sunshine, bathes its object in a genial and abiding light.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Conservatism is a very good thing; but how many conservatives announce principles which might have shocked Dick Turpin, or nonsensicalities flat enough to have raised contempt in Jerry Sneak!
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
What does competency in the long run mean? It means to all reasonable beings, cleanliness of person, decency of dress, courtesy of manners, opportunities for education, the delights of leisure, and the bliss of giving.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
From the hour of the invention of printing, books, and not kings, were to rule the world. Weapons forged in the mind, keen-edged, and brighter than a sunbeam, were to supplant the sword and battle-axe.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
There is a natural disposition with us to judge an author’s personal character by the character of his works. We find it difficult to understand the common antithesis of a good writer and a bad man.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
God, in His wrath, has not left this world to the mercy of the subtlest dialectician; and all arguments are happily transitory in their effect when they contradict the primal intuitions of conscience and the inborn sentiments of the heart.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Nothing really succeeds which is not based on reality; sham, in a large sense, is never successful; in the life of the individual, as in the more comprehensive life of the state, pretention is nothing and power is everything.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
What a man does with his wealth depends upon his idea of happiness. Those who draw prizes in life are apt to spend tastelessly, if not viciously; not knowing that it requires as much talent to spend as to make.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Wit implies hatred or contempt of folly and crime, produces its effects by brisk shocks of surprise, uses the whip of scorpions and the branding-iron, stabs, stings, pinches, tortures, goads, teases, corrodes, undermines.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
As men neither fear nor respect what has been made contemptible, all honor to him who makes oppression laughable as well as detestable. Armies cannot protect it then; and walls which have remained impenetrable to cannon have fallen before a roar of laughter or a hiss of contempt.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Lord Chatham and Napoleon were as much actors as Garrick or Talma. Now, an imposing air should always be taken as evidence of imposition. Dignity is often a veil between us and the real truth of things.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Some men find happiness in gluttony and in drunkenness, but no delicate viands can touch their taste with the thrill of pleasure, and what generosity there is in wine steadily refuses to impart its glow to their shriveled hearts.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down to the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram; and the proverbs of nations, which embody the common sense of nations, have the brisk concussion of the most sparkling wit.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
A large portion of human beings live not so much in themselves as in what they desire to be. They create what is called an ideal character, in an ideal form, whose perfections compensate in some degree for the imperfections of their own.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly. Holmes disposed of a bigot at once, when he compared his mind to the pupil of the eye,—the more light you let into it the more it contracts.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Genius is not a single power, but a combination of great powers. It reasons, but it is not reasoning; it judges, but it is not judgment; it imagines, but it is not imagination; it feels deeply and fiercely, but it is not passion. It is neither, because it is all.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)