There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular one is Providence.
More than once I have been humiliated by my resemblance to God the father; He is always longing for the love of His children and trying to get it on the cheapest and laziest terms He can invent.
Now I can only pray that there may be a God – and a heaven – or something better.
God pours out love upon all with a lavish hand – but He reserves vengeance for His very own.
It is the will of God that we must have critics and missionaries and congressmen and humorists, and we must bear the burden.
We grant God the possession of all the qualities of mind except the one that keeps the others healthy; that watches over their dignity; that focuses their vision true – humor.
None of us can be as great as God, but any of us can be as good.
God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New – the Jekyl and Hyde of sacred romance.
To be busy is man’s only happiness.
Happiness ain’t a thing in itself – it’s only a contrast with something that ain’t pleasant.
Men are like bank accounts. The more money, the more interest they generate.
The funniest things are the forbidden.
Humorists of the ‘mere’ sort cannot survive. Humor is only a fragrance, a decoration.
Humor must be one of the chief attributes of God. Plants and animals that are distinctly humorous in form and characteristics are God’s jokes.
I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the dictionary to get laughs. I can’t spell, but I have never stooped to spell cat with a ‘k’ to get at your funny bone. I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side.
Humor, to be comprehensible to anybody, must be built upon a foundation with which he is familiar. If he can’t see the foundation the superstructure is to him merely a freak – like the Flatiron building without any visible means of support – something that ought to be arrested.
English humor is hard to appreciate, though, unless you are trained to it. The English papers, in reporting my speeches, always put ‘laughter’ in the wrong place.
The inability to forget is far more devastating than the inability to remember.
Information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious otter of roses out of the otter.
For all the talk you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instinct is worth forty of it for real unerringness.