Tag: The Devil’s Dictionary

April Fool’s Day Quotes

Posted on March 31, 2011 by

April Fool’s Day is here. Let’s celebrate it with some useful April Fool’s Day Quotes.

April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four. ~Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894

April fool, n. The March fool with another month added to his folly. ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. ~Chinese Proverb

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee,
And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me. ~Robert Frost, “Cluster of Faith,” 1962

He who is born a fool is never cured. ~Proverb

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed. ~Mark Twain

If every fool wore a crown, we should all be kings. ~Welsh Proverb

I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it. ~Jack Handey

We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance. ~Japanese Proverb

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. ~Abraham Lincoln

Even the gods love jokes. ~Plato

The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected. ~Will Rogers

A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark. ~Henry Louis Mencken

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. ~Douglas Adams

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

Don’t give cherries to pigs or advice to fools. ~Irish Proverb

A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself. ~Clifton Paul Fadiman

It is better to weep with wise men than to laugh with fools. ~Spanish Proverb

I have great faith in fools – self-confidence, my friends call it. ~Edgar Allan Poe

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded. ~George Orwell

Men reach their sexual peak at eighteen. Women reach theirs at thirty-five. Do you get the feeling that God is playing a practical joke? ~Rita Rudner

Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one? ~George Bernard Shaw

Real friends are those who, when you feel you’ve made a fool of yourself, don’t feel you’ve done a permanent job. ~Author Unknown

One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. “Oh, no,” I said. “Disneyland burned down.” He cried and cried, but I think that deep down, he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late. ~Jack Handey

Education Quotes

Posted on November 23, 2010 by

# “I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.” — Edith Ann, [Lily Tomlin]

# “You teach best what you most need to learn.” — Richard David Bach

# A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions. – Anonymous

# A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep. – Anonymous

# A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students. – John Ciardi

# A university professor set an examination question in which he asked what is the difference between ignorance and apathy. The professor had to give an A+ to a student who answered: I don’t know and I don’t care. – Richard Pratt, Pacific Computer Weekly, 20 July 1990

# “Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.” — (Louis) Hector Berlioz

# Academy: A modern school where football is taught. – Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) – The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911

# An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field. – Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

# Education … has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. – G. M. Trevelyan

# Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices. – Laurence J. Peter

# An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less. – Nicholas Murray Butler

# Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. – Will Durant

# Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. – Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

# Experience is a good school, but the fees are high. – Heinrich Heine

# Experience is a great advantage. The problem is that when you get the experience, you’re too damned old to do anything about it. – Jimmy Connors

# Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you. – Aldous Huxley

# “Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.” – John Cotton Dana

# “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” – Henry Brooks Adams

# “What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.” –George Bernard Shaw

# “Good teachers are those who know how little they know. Bad teachers are those who think they know more than they don’t know.” – R. Verdi

# “Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.”
— Perelman

# “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” – Albert Einstein

# “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” – Mark Twain

# “Education is not the answer to the question. Education is the means to the answer to all questions.” – William Allin

# “Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward.” – Vernon Law

# “I may have said the same thing before… But my explanation, I am sure, will always be different.” – Oscar Wilde

# “Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm.” – Publilius Syrus

Childhood Quotes

Posted on January 9, 2010 by

– “There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.” – Elizabeth Lawrence

– “Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.” – John Betjeman

– “Sweet childish days, that were as long
As twenty days are now.” – William Wordsworth, “To a Butterfly”

– “Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth – two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.” – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911

– “We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.” – George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860

– “Childhood is the most beautiful of all life’s seasons.” – Unknown

– “Childhood is a promise that is never kept.” – Ken Hill

– “Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.” – Katherine Anne Porter

– “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” – Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

– “When you finally go back to your old hometown, you find it wasn’t the old home you missed but your childhood.” – Sam Ewing

– “In childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking out. In memories of childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking in.” – Robert Brault

– “The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold,
Of being only four years old.” – Christopher Morley, To a Child

– “If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.” – Tom Stoppard

– “I’d give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life’s decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer day.” – Lewis Carroll, “Solitude”

– “It is never too late to have a happy childhood.” – Tom Robbins

– “What we remember from childhood we remember forever – permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.” – Cynthia Ozick

– “The childhood shows the man
As morning shows the day.” – John Milton, Paradise Regained

– “Childhood is a short season.” – Helen Hayes

– “He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast.” – Herbert Gold

– “Childhood is that wonderful time of life when all you need to do to lose weight is take a bath.” – Unknown

– “The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.” – Ellen Glasgow

– “Old age lives minutes slowly, hours quickly; childhood chews hours and swallows minutes.” – Malcolm de Chazal