Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.

If you wonder which is the stronger sex, watch which one twists the other around her little finger.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people - that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.

A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.

Every man is occasionally visited by the suspicion that the planet on which he is riding is not really going anywhere; that the Force which controls its measured eccentricities hasn't got anything special in mind. If he broods on this somber theme long enough he gets the doleful idea that the laughing children on a merry-go-round or the thin, fine hands of a lady's watch are revolving more purposely than he is.

Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.

It was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them from our garden. 'I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber were dead, and I hate trees,' said Lisa.