Humorous Sayings
1,488 sayings found from the Early Modern era
The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.
I do not like X as a symbol for multiplication, as it is easily confounded with x.
There is nothing without a reason.
The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.
Money is a great servant but a bad master.
Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.
Friends are thieves of time.
Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.
A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
Hurl your calumnies boldly; something is sure to stick.
The less people speak of their greatness, the more we think of it.
There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
Revenge is a kind of wild justice.
To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.
Let them call me a rebel and welcome. I feel no concern from it. But should I suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul.
Small islands, not capable of protecting themselves, are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is something absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.
Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.