Samuel Langhorne Clemens Quotes on Humor

21 quotes

  1. Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)

  2. I'll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county.

  3. I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.

  4. The funniest things are the forbidden.

  5. Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away and a sunny spirit takes their place.

  6. [The human race], in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon - laughter.

  7. Guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke.

  8. Probable nor'east to sou'west winds, varying to the soutard and westard and eastard and points between; high and low barometer, sweeping round from place to place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail, and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes with thunder and lightning.

  9. Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR.

  10. The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.

  11. He [Mark Twain] spoke of humor, and thought it must be one of the chief attributes of God. He cited plants and animals that were distinctly humorous in form and in their characteristics. These he declared were God's jokes.

  12. Only laughter can blow [a colossal humbug] to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

  13. France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.

  14. All you have to fear is your mother's cooking.

  15. Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

  16. Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes time and annoys the pig.

  17. Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.

  18. The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

  19. There is nothing lower than the human race except the French.

  20. Tomorrow is the yesterday of two days from now.

  21. Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fighting over.

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