Quotable Quotes

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Quotable Quotes Page 19

by Editors of Reader's Digest


  ROBERTSON DAVIES

  in Our Living Tradition

  I think the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humor in it.

  —FRANK A. CLARK

  Humor is a hole that lets the sawdust out of a stuffed shirt.

  —JAN MCKEITHEN

  Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got when you ought to have it.

  —LANGSTON HUGHES

  A humorist is a fellow who realizes, first, that he is no better than anybody else, and, second, that nobody else is either.

  —HOMER MCLIN

  Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.

  —SID CAESAR

  Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

  —PETER USTINOV

  Always laugh at yourself first—before others do.

  —ELSA MAXWELL

  R.S.V.P.: Elsa Maxwell’s Own Story

  A laugh at your own expense costs you nothing.

  —MARY H. WALDRIP

  in Advertiser (Dawson County, Georgia)

  Happy is the person who can laugh at himself. He will never cease to be amused.

  —HABIB BOURGUIBA

  Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It’s unbridled, it’s unplanned, it’s full of surprises.

  —ERMA BOMBECK

  Humor is a reminder that no matter how high the throne one sits on, one sits on one’s bottom.

  —TAKI

  You cannot hold back a good laugh any more than you can the tide. Both are forces of nature.

  —WILLIAM ROTSLER

  It has always seemed to me that hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors.

  —NORMAN COUSINS

  Anatomy of an Illness

  When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.

  —JAMES M. BARRIE

  No symphony orchestra ever played music like a two-year-old girl laughing with a puppy.

  —BERN WILLIAMS

  in National Enquirer

  A pun is the lowest form of humor, unless you thought of it yourself.

  —DOUG LARSON

  WIT OUGHT TO BE A GLORIOUS TREAT . . .

  Wit ought to be a glorious treat, like caviar. Never spread it about like marmalade.

  —NOËL COWARD

  Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

  —DOROTHY PARKER

  in The Paris Review

  Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.

  —WILLIAM HAZLITT

  Wit is educated insolence.

  —ARISTOTLE

  A caricature is always true only for an instant.

  —CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN

  Wit penetrates; humor envelops. Wit is a function of verbal intelligence; humor is imagination operating on good nature.

  —PEGGY NOONAN

  What I Saw at the Revolution

  The wit of conversation consists more in finding it in others than in showing a great deal yourself.

  —JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE

  THE ONLY WAY TO KEEP YOUR HEALTH . . .

  The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d druther not.

  —MARK TWAIN

  The only way for a rich man to be healthy is, by exercise and abstinence, to live as if he were poor.

  —PAUL DUDLEY WHITE

  So many people spend their health gaining wealth, and then have to spend their wealth to regain their health.

  —A. J. REB MATERI

  Our Family

  It would be a service to mankind if the pill were available in slot machines and the cigarette were placed on prescription.

  —MALCOLM POTTS, MD

  in The Observer (London)

  The best cure for hypochondria is to forget about your own body and get interested in someone else’s.

  —GOODMAN ACE

  Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.

  —EDWARD STANLEY

  It is part of the cure to wish to be cured.

  —SENECA

  You know you’ve reached middle age when a doctor, not a policeman, tells you to slow down, all you exercise are your prerogatives and it takes you longer to rest than to get tired.

  —Friends News Sheet

  (Royal Perth Hospital, Australia)

  An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  As with liberty, the price of leanness is eternal vigilance.

  —GENE BROWN

  Your body is the baggage you must carry through life. The more excess baggage, the shorter the trip.

  —ARNOLD H. GLASOW

  You can’t lose weight by talking about it. You have to keep your mouth shut.

  —The Old Farmers Almanac

  You know it’s time to diet when you push away from the table and the table moves.

  —Quoted in The Cockle Bur

  Probably nothing in the world arouses more false hopes than the first four hours of a diet.

  —DAN BENNETT

  If it weren’t for the fact that the TV set and the refrigerator are so far apart, some of us wouldn’t get any exercise at all.

  —JOEY ADAMS

  TAKING MY PROBLEMS ONE AT A TIME . . .

  It’s not easy taking my problems one at a time when they refuse to get in line.

  —ASHLEIGH BRILLIANT

  He who can’t endure the bad will not live to see the good.

  —YIDDISH PROVERB

  It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.

  —ISAAC ASIMOV

  Foundation

  When things are bad, we take comfort in the thought that they could always be worse. And when they are, we find hope in the thought that things are so bad they have to get better.

  —MALCOLM S. FORBES

  The Sayings of Chairman Malcolm

  I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.

  —ANNE FRANK

  The Diary of a Young Girl

  Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.

  —HELEN KELLER

  Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

  —JAMES BALDWIN

  A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with the wind.

  —JOHN NEAL

  What I’m looking for is a blessing that’s not in disguise.

  —KITTY O’NEILL COLLINS

  People need resistance, for it is resistance which gives them their awareness of life.

  —KARL RITTER

  That some good can be derived from every event is a better proposition than that everything happens for the best, which it assuredly does not.

  —JAMES K. FEIBLEMAN

  The worst thing in your life may contain seeds of the best. When you can see crisis as an opportunity, your life becomes not easier, but more satisfying.

  —JOE KOGEL

  Storms make trees take deeper roots.

  —CLAUDE MCDONALD

  in The Christian Word

  Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.

  —AFRICAN PROVERB

  It is the wounded oyster that mends its shell w
ith pearl.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.

  —JOHN VANCE CHENEY

  Some people are always grumbling that roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses.

  —ALPHONSE KARR

  He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.

  —BEN JONSON

  Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it, a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not.

  —HENRY FIELDING

  You’ll never find a better sparring partner than adversity.

  —WALT SCHMIDT

  in Parklabrea News (Los Angeles)

  A gem is not polished without rubbing, nor a man perfected without trials.

  —CHINESE PROVERB

  Drag your thoughts away from your troubles—by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it. It’s the healthiest thing a body can do.

  —MARK TWAIN

  Borrow trouble for yourself if that’s your nature, but don’t lend it to your neighbors.

  —RUDYARD KIPLING

  Rewards and Fairies

  Don’t meet trouble halfway. It is quite capable of making the entire journey.

  —BOB EDWARDS

  Simple solutions seldom are.

  —Forbes magazine

  No one has completed his education who has not learned to live with an insoluble problem.

  —EDMUND J. KIEFER

  Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows.

  —HELEN KELLER

  When you can’t solve the problem, manage it.

  —REV. ROBERT H. SCHULLER

  Most problems precisely defined are already partially solved.

  —HARRY LORAYNE

  Memory Makes Money

  If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

  —ABRAHAM MASLOW

  Nothing lasts forever—not even your troubles.

  —ARNOLD H. GLASOW

  in Rotary “Scandal Sheet” (Graham, Texas)

  People who drink to drown their sorrow should be told that sorrow knows how to swim.

  —ANN LANDERS

  The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.

  —DOLLY PARTON

  The human capacity to fight back will always astonish doctors and philosophers. It seems, indeed, that there are no circumstances so bad and no obstacles so big that man cannot conquer them.

  —JEAN TETREAU

  How a person masters his fate is more important than what his fate is.

  —WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT

  All blessings are mixed blessings.

  —JOHN UPDIKE

  Most of the shadows of this life are caused by our standing in our own sunshine.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  Life would not be life if a sorrow were sad, and a joy merry, from beginning to end.

  —GERMAINE GUEVREMONT

  En Pleine Terre

  Night is the blotting paper for many sorrows.

  —LITAUISCH

  The darkest hour has only 60 minutes.

  —MORRIS MANDEL

  When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. And swing!

  —LEO BUSCAGLIA

  Every problem contains within itself the seeds of its own solution.

  —EDWARD SOMERS

  in National Enquirer

  Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow.

  —SWEDISH PROVERB

  Little things console us because little things afflict us.

  —BLAISE PASCAL

  For every problem there is one solution which is simple, neat and wrong.

  —H. L. MENCKEN

  A Mencken Chrestomathy

  Inside every small problem is a large problem struggling to get out.

  —PAUL HUGHES

  People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.

  —NEIL POSTMAN

  The first step in solving a problem is to tell someone about it.

  —JOHN PETER FLYNN

  Some people suffer in silence louder than others.

  —MORRIE BRICKMAN

  Untold suffering seldom is.

  —FRANKLIN P. JONES

  Never bear more than one kind of trouble at a time. Some people bear three—all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have.

  —EDWARD EVERETT HALE

  An adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

  —G. K. CHESTERTON

  IT IS THE LOOSE ENDS . . .

  It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves.

  —ZELDA FITZGERALD

  Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

  —PAUL VALÉRY

  Nothing is really lost. It’s just where it doesn’t belong.

  —SUZANNE MUELLER

  One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

  —A. A. MILNE

  More things grow in the garden than the gardener sows.

  —SPANISH PROVERB

  Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it’s not all mixed up.

  —A. A. MILNE

  When one finds himself in a hole of his own making, it is a good time to examine the quality of workmanship.

  —JON REMMERDE

  in The Christian Science Monitor

  WHEN LUCK ENTERS . . .

  When luck enters, give him a seat!

  —JEWISH PROVERB

  A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.

  —JEAN DE LA FONTAINE

  Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

  —MARK TWAIN

  It’s hard to detect good luck—it looks so much like something you’ve earned.

  —FRANK A. CLARK

  Luck is the residue of design.

  —BRANCH RICKEY

  The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck.

  —HECTOR BERLIOZ

  Luck never gives; it only lends.

  —SWEDISH PROVERB

  Good luck is with the man who doesn’t include it in his plan.

  —Graffiti

  Thorough preparation makes its own luck.

  —JOE POYER

  The Contra

  Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.

  —OPRAH WINFREY

  Miracles sometimes occur, but one has to work terribly hard for them.

  —CHAIM WEIZMANN

  Luck is not chance, it’s toil. Fortune’s expensive smile is earned.

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  One half of life is luck; the other half is discipline—and that’s the important half, for without discipline you wouldn’t know what to do with your luck.

  —CARL ZUCKMAYER

  With money in your pocket, you are wise and you are handsome and you sing well, too.

  —YIDDISH PROVERB

  Some people have all the luck. And they’re the ones who never depend on it.

  —BOB INGHAM

  There is no substitute for incomprehensible good luck.

  —LYNNE ALPERN AND ESTHER BLUMENFELD

  Oh, Lord, I Sound Just Like Mama />
  Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering the farmer’s daughter.

  —Quoted by JULIUS H. COMROE JR. in Retrospectroscope

  It is an all-too-human frailty to suppose that a favorable wind will blow forever.

  —RICK BODE

  First You Have to Row a Little Boat

  It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be born a millionaire.

  —ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational—but how much does it cost you to knock on wood?

  —JUDITH VIORST

  Love & Guilt & the Meaning of Life, Etc.

  THE LIMITS OF THE POSSIBLE . . .

  The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

 

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