Humor e Ironia

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,

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

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

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’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?

Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind, is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can.

‘Oh! it is only a novel! … only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda:’ or, in short, only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

A poet’s hope: to be,