Josh Billings on humor

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.

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

George Bernard Shaw1856–1950The Doctor’s Dilemma (1911), Act V

• Life & Death

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritation and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.

Mark Twain1835–1910“What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us?” (1897)

You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.

Bill Cosbyborn 1937