Josh Billings Quotes

It is the little bits of things that fret and worry us; we can dodge a elephant, but we can't dodge a fly.

Admiration is a youthful fancy will which scarcely ever survives to mature years.

When a man comes to me for advice, I find out the kind of advice he wants, and I give it to him.

There's tons of people that spend a lot time watching their well being, they have not acquired time to take pleasure in it.

The very thing that men think they have got the most of, they have got the least of; and that is judgment.

Shame is the dying embers of virtue.

I never knew a man troubled with melancholy, who had plenty to do, and did it.

We mingle in society not so much to meet others as to escape ourselves.

As long as we are lucky we attribute it to our smartness; our bad luck we give the gods credit for.

As in a game ov cards, so in the game ov life, we must play what is dealt tew us, and the glory consists, not so mutch in winning, as in playing a poor hand well.

Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.

There is no passion of the human heart that promises so much and pays so little as revenge.

Politeness is better than logic. You can often persuade when you cannot convince.

A slander is like a hornet; if you cannot kill it dead at the first blow, better not to strike at it.

Don't have any more secrets than you can keep yourself.

It's not what we don't know that prevents us from succeeding; it's what we know that just ain't so that is our greatest obstacle.

Satire that is seasonable and just is often more effectual than law or gospel.

Show me a thoroughly contented person, and I will show you a useless one.

The miser and the glutton are two facetious buzzards: one hides his store, and the other stores his hide.

There are very few good judges of humor, and they don't agree.

When I see a man of shallow understanding extravagantly clothed, I feel sorry - for the clothes.

There are two things in life for which we are never truly prepared: twins.

Old maids sweeten their tea with scandal.

The trouble with most folks isn't their ignorance. It's knowin' so many things that ain't so.

Caution, though very often wasted is a good risk to take.

It AIN'T so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't so.

If mankind were only just what they pretend to be, the problem of the millennium would be immediately solved.

The dog that will follow everbody ain't worth a curse.

Silence never makes any blunders.

The time to pray is not when we are in a tight spot but just as soon as we get out of it.

Theres not a lot of good humor in medicine, but theres a lot of medicine in good humor.

There are two kinds of fools: those who can't change their opinions and those who won't.

Contentment is a kind of moral laziness; if there wasn't anything but contentment in his world, man wouldn't be any more of a success than an angleworm is

Silence is said to be golden, but the best fools the world has ever produced had nothing to say on the subject

The man who gets bit twice by the same dog is better adapted for that kind of business than any other.

Music wasn't made to make us wise, but better natured.

If you would make yourself agreeable wherever you go, listen to the grievances of others but never relate your own.

I hold that a man has as much right to spell a word as it is pronounced as he has to pronounce it the way it ain't spelled.

Prejudice assumes the garb of reason, but the cheat is too thin.

Genuine laughing is the vent of the soul, the nostrils of the heart, and just as necessary for health and happiness as spring water is for a trout.

Pity costs nothing, and it ain't worth nothing.

When a man gets talking about himself, he seldom fails to be eloquent and often reaches the sublime.

Marrying a woman for her money is very much like setting a rat-trap, and baiting it with your own finger.

The easiest thing for our friends to discover in us, and the hardest thing for us to discover in ourselves, is that we are growing old.

When good-natured people leave us we look forward with extra pleasure to their return.

Laughter is the sensation of feeling good all over and showing it principally in one place.

A man cannot learn to be wise any more than he can learn to be handsome.

I never had a man come to me for advice yet, but what I soon discovered that he thought more of his own opinion than he did of mine.