Josh Billings Quotes - Page 4

Never work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first.

Admiration is a youthful fancy will which scarcely ever survives to mature years.

Advice is like castor oil — easy enough to give but dreadful hard to take.

Where religion is a trade, morality is a merchandise.

The trouble with most folks isn't their ignorance. It's knowin' so many things that ain't so.

Life is short, but it's long enough to ruin any man who wants to be ruined.

One of the best temporary cures for pride and affectation is seasickness; a man who wants to vomit never puts on airs.

The unfortunate do not pity the unfortunate.

Friendship is like earthenware, once broken, it can be mended; love is like a mirror, once broken that ends it.

Rumor is like bees; the more you fight them the more you don't get rid of them.

The lion and the lamb may, possibly, sumtime lay down in this world together for a fu minnits, but when the lion kums tew git up, the lamb will be missing.

If men were stubborn just in proportion as they were right, stubbornness would take her seat among the virtues; but men are generally stubborn just in proportion as they are ignorant and wrong.

A man running for office puts me in mind of a dog that's lost-he smells everybody he meets, and wags himself all over.

To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself once in a while.

As long as we are lucky we attribute it to our smartness; our bad luck we give the gods credit for.

Men of genius are like eagles, they live on what they kill, while men of talents are like crows, they live on what has been killed for them.

I don't care how much a man talks, if he only says it in a few words.

Better make a weak man your enemy than your friend.

I would much rather always look forward to the time when I am going to ride in a carriage, than to look back on the time when I used to.

Occasions are rare; and those, who know how to seize upon them, are rarer.

Adversity has the same effect on a man that severe training has on the pugilist: it reduces him to his fighting weight.

Plenty of folks are so contrary that if they should fall into the river, they would insist upon floating upstream.

Self-made men are most always apt to be a little too proud of the job.

There is no greater evidence of superior intelligence than to be surprised at nothing.

Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt, not swallowed.