Quotes

Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.

It is as impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind, as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.

Conversation between Adam and Eve must have been difficult at times because they had nobody to talk about.

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.

A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever, and generally stopping before it gets there.

It is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more.

It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.

Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.

The clear-sighted do not rule the world, but they sustain and console it.

There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.

Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature.

The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.

It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization.

The tourist may complain of other tourists, but he would be lost without them.

Edged tools are dangerous things to handle, and not infrequently do much hurt.

The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world's mirth.

It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.

There is always a secret irritation about a laugh into which we cannot join.

I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.

No one yet knows what a man's province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial.

In one hotel, the maid who built the fire fainted in our room. Exhaustion was the cause. We talked with her later and learned that she worked 17 hours a day and makes 95 marks a month - about 50 cents.

Like all my family and class, I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection; to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace, and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster.

Yet it is awful to love a person who is a torture to you. And a fascinating person who loves you and won't hear of anything but your loving him and living right by his side through all eternity!

Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.