Emotions and Feelings

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles, from the desperate to the sheepish.

Bait, n . A preparation that renders the hook more palatable. The best kind is beauty.

Zeal is a volcano, on the peak of which the grass of indecisiveness does not grow.

Youth lives on hope, old age on remembrance.

The deepest definition of Youth is Life as yet untouched by tragedy.

In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theater before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin.

In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theater before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin.

Years are only garments, and you either wear them with style all your life, or else you go dowdy to the grave.

whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals . . . he seeks to establish a relationship.

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.

Apt words have pow’r to swage The tumors of a troubled mind, And are as balm to fester’d wounds.

There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

As hand-to-hand combat has gradually disappeared . . . Americans have turned to the automobile to satisfy their love of direct aggression.

Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit.

A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.

It is with wits as with razors, which are never so apt to cut those they are employed on as when they have lost their edge.

There is no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature; the malice in a good thing is the barb that makes it stick.

The greatest fault of a penetrating wit is to go beyond the mark.

Wit is like caviar; it should be savored in small elegant proportions, and not spread about like marmalade.

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.

Always leave something to wish for; otherwise you will be miserable from your very happiness.