Humor e Ironia

Doubtless the pleasure is as great

Love is a boy, by poets styled,

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

Tam tint his reason a’ thegither,

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.

He that is down needs fear no fall,

A man that could look no way but downwards, with a muckrake in his hand.

Yet my great-grandfather was but a waterman, looking one way, and rowing another.

It beareth the name of Vanity-Fair, because the town where ‘tis kept, is lighter than vanity.

There was a young lady named Bright,

The liberals can understand everything but people who don’t understand them.

Gr-r-r—there go, my heart’s abhorrence!

The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.

A fool can always find a greater fool to admire him.

Prudence is a rich, ugly, old maid courted by Incapacity.

The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight,

Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light

Drinking when we are not thirsty and making love all year round, madam; that is all there is to distinguish us from other animals.

I hurry to laugh at everything, for fear of having to weep at it.

I’m as pure as the driven slush.

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?

May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are the result of previous study?