“There is nothing more silly than a silly laugh.”

Oh, this age! How tasteless and ill bred it is!

Every one has his faults: but we do not see the wallet on our own backs.

What a woman says to an eager lover, write it on running water, write it on air.

It is difficult to lay aside a confirmed passion.

The vows that woman makes to her fond lover are only fit to be written on air or on the swiftly passing stream.

Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love. Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus

I hate and love. You ask, perhaps, how can that be? I know not, but I feel the agony.

It is difficult to suddenly give up a long love. Difficile est longum subito deponere amorem

Give up wanting to deserve any thanks from anyone, or thinking anybody can be grateful.

Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then a thousand more.

Now Spring restores the balmy heat, now Zephyr’s sweet breezes calm the rage of the equinoctial sky.

I hate and I love, and who can tell me why?

So a maiden, whilst she remains untouched, so long is she dear to her own; when she has lost her chaste flower with sullied body, she remains neither lovely to boys nor dear to girls.

For the godly poet must be chaste himself, but there is no need for his verses to be so.

Who now travels that dark path from whose bourne they say no one returns. [Lat., Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum Illue unde negant redire quemquam.]

I write of youth, of love, and have access by these to sing of cleanly wantonness.

I have never been converted to or even had much interest in spiritualism, occultism, Swedenborgianism or any particular religion. And I never, except occasionally for a laugh, visit the quacks who call themselves psychics.

However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.

Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas.

I did standup while still working for Johnny Carson in the mid-’60s, thus gaining the advantage of at least getting laughs from him about how I hadn’t the night before.

It’s fun once in a while to do a serious part but I really enjoy doing comedy because I love to laugh.

I enjoy making people laugh. The trick is to tell them jokes against yourself. If you praise yourself, your stories aren’t funny.

If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.

Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo, Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another.