Work! labor the asparagus me of life; the one great sacrament of humanity from which all other things flow - security, leisure, joy, art, literature, even divinity itself.

Nothing seems too high or low for the humorist; he is above honor, above faith, preserving sense in religion and sanity in life.

When I stepped from hard manual work to writing, I just stepped from one kind of hard work to another.

You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea: you can not put an idea up against a barracks-square wall and riddle it with bullets: you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell that your slaves could ever build.

We couldn't live without comedy.

If church prelates, past or present, had even an inkling of physiology they'd realize that what they term this inner ugliness creates and nourishes the hearing ear, the seeing eye, the active mind, and energetic body of man and woman, in the same way that dirt and dung at the roots give the plant its delicate leaves and the full-blown rose.

Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness - the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.