“Encourage innocent amusement.”

Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.

If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.

Let freedom never perish in your hands.

The great difference is, that the first knows how to pick and cull his thoughts for conversation, by suppressing some, and communicating others; whereas the other lets them all indifferently fly out in words.

A contented mind is the greatest blessing a man can enjoy in this world.

The voice of reason is more to be regarded than the bent of any present inclination; since inclination will at length come over to reason, though we can never force reason to comply with inclination.

The hours of a wise man are lengthened by his ideas.

Were a man’s sorrows and disquietudes summed up at the end of his life.

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the human soul.

Content thyself to be obscurely good.

The utmost extent of man’s knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

The most skillful flattery is to let a person talk on, and be a listener.

Nothing that isn’t a real crime makes a man appear so contemptible and little in the eyes of the world as inconsistency.

Man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.

There are many more shining qualities in the mind of man, but there is none so useful as discretion.

We are growing serious, and, let me tell you, that’s the very next step to being dull.

In one book, CACHALOT, just for my own amusement, every character is based directly on someone I have known.

I take the most wrenchingly painful moments of my life, brush them off and present them for the amusement of others. Luckily for me, my childhood was torture.

You only have temporary curiosity, amusement, and challenges, but that does not necessarily mean you are really convinced that it’s necessary or that it’s not even worth to do it.

There may be something in this theory, but when their amusements are carried to such a point of luxurious and imaginative perfection it certainly gives them great and even unlimited enjoyment at the time.

Life in itself is short enough, but the physicians with their art, know to their amusement, how to make it still shorter.

I got a job at an amusement park. I like to make the rides more terrifying by throwing a couple of screws onto the seats.

The game of baseball is a clean, straight game, and it summons to its presence everybody who enjoys clean, straight athletics. It furnishes amusement to the thousands and thousands.

I can’t bare you when you’re not amusing.