Robert Benchley has a style that is weak and lies down frequently to rest.

It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.

A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener's mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn't expect to go.

A smile is the universal welcome.

Robert Benchley has a style that is weak and lies down frequently to rest.

I don't know why it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall down. You might think we would lie there and rest for a while.

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds society together.

A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything.

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails.

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo.

The worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them.

Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully.

Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Dogs laugh but they laugh with their tails.

Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind.

Patriotism is one of the unalterable facts of man's nature. It is a virtue if you like it, and a vice if you don't like it.

Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

Act well your part, there all the honour lies.

The real peril of war lies not in military defeat. It lies in war itself, whether we win or lose.

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.

Seeking to forget makes exile all the longer; the secret of redemption lies in remembrance.

Because of the lack of education on AIDS, discrimination, fear, panic, and lies surrounded me.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.

The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.

The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish.

Americans detest all lies except lies spoken in public or printed lies.

The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.

The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting. I think getting beyond the four edges of an opportunity or challenge is one of the basic skills you need in business.

The road to perseverance lies by doubt.

The power of a book lies in its power to turn a solitary act into a shared vision. As long as we have books, we are not alone.

I firmly believe that any man's finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle - victorious.

Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.

The secret of a person's nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt.

For me the greatest beauty always lies in the greatest clarity.

Remember, beneath every cynic there lies a romantic, and probably an injured one.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

The way of a man's heart will be foreshadowed by what goodness lies in him - coming from above, and from around; but a way foreshadowed is not a way made.

The elite media has been caught in so many lies because of false statements that its whole reputation has eroded, their circulation is down, and their profits are down.

The golden age has not passed; it lies in the future.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

You can't take a character anywhere they don't expect the character to go. But within those confines is where creativity lies.

We don't suggest that because San Francisco lies on top of an earthquake fault that it should be moved.