A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener's mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn't expect to go.
A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything.
A poet in history is divine; but a poet in the next room is a joke.
A smile is the universal welcome.
Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind.
Hegelism is like a mental disease- you cannot know what it is until you get it, and then you can't know because you've got it.
History is not an escalator.
Humor is a kind of emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect. There is always a laugh in the utterly familiar.
Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully.
I don't know why it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall down. You might think we would lie there and rest for a while.
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.
Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds society together.
Living well is the best revenge. If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.
Man has been defined as the laughing animal, but that is not strictly accurate. Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails. And a tail is an awkward thing to laugh with as you can see by the way they bend themselves half double in extreme hilarity trying to get that rear-end exuberance forward into the main scene of action. What puts man on a higher state of evolution is that he has got his laugh on the right end.
Marxists profess to reject religion in favor of science, but they cherish a belief that the external universe is evolving with reliable, if not divine, necessity in exactly the direction in which they want to go.
Patriotism is one of the unalterable facts of man's nature. It is a virtue if you like it, and a vice if you don't like it.
People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo.
The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.
The real guarantee of freedom is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict, not the triumph of any one force.
The worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them.
There is something self-defeating in the too-conscious pursuit of pleasure.
There is truth in the high opinion that in so far as a man conforms, he ceases to exist.
Found 23 occurence(s) in 52,082 quotation(s).
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