Josh Billings Quotes

Our continual desire for praise ought to convince us of our mortality, if nothing else will.

Ill-nature is a sort of running sore of the disposition.

Most everyone seems willing to be a fool himself, but he can't bear to have anyone else one.

Fun is a sugar-coated physic.

Faith is the soul riding at anchor.

Experience is a school where a man learns what a big fool he has been.

There is not a whole lot of fun in medicine but there is a whole lot of medicine in fun.

Liberty, like chastity, once lost, can never be regained in its original purity.

Don't have any more secrets than you can keep yourself.

What the world wants iz [sic] good examples, not so mutch advice; advice may be wrong, but examples prove themselves.

The very thing that men think they have got the most of, they have got the least of; and that is judgment.

Knowledge is like money, the more a man gits the more he hankers for.

Everybody in this world wants watching, but nobody more than ourselves.

It's not ignorance does so much damage; it's knowin' so derned much that ain't so.

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

Silence is one of the hardest kind of arguments to refute. There is no good substitute for wisdom; but silence is the best that has yet been discovered.

Biography is the best form of history.

The fools in this world make about as much trouble as the wicked do.

Debt is a trap which man sets and baits himself, and then deliberately gets into.

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

Where religion is a trade, morality is a merchandise.

Prejudice is a house-plant which is very apt to wilt if you take it out-of-doors among folks.

Pedantry is paraded knowledge.

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

It's not what we don't know that prevents us from succeeding; it's what we know that just ain't so that is our greatest obstacle.

Unless we put heart and soul into our labor we but brutify our actions.

When a man makes up his mind to become a rascal, he should examine himself closely and see if he isn't better constructed for a fool.

Show me a thoroughly contented person, and I will show you a useless one.

Everyone who does the best he can is a hero.

I called my cat William because no shorter name fits the dignity of his character. Poor old man, he has fits now, so I call him Fitz-William.

About the only difference between the poor and the rich, is this, the poor suffer misery, while the rich have to enjoy it.

The quickest way to take the starch out of someone who is always blaming himself is to agree with him.

Error will slip through a crack, while truth will stick in a doorway.

The nearest we can come to) perfect happiness is to cheat ourselves with the belief that we have got it.

I have lived in this world just long enough to look carefully the second time into things that I am most certain of the first time.

Take the humbug out of this world, and you haven't much left to do business with.

A secret ceases to be a secret if it is once confided - it is like a dollar bill, once broken, it is never a dollar again.

True valor is like honesty; it enters into all that a man sees and does.

Anxiety will bear a lot of nuisance.

The less we know the more we suspect

He whom prosperity humbles, and adversity strengthens, is the true hero.

We have some writers so abstruse and deep that they drown themselves in their fathomless sentences.

Dangers are sum like a kold bath, very dangerous while you stand stripped on the bank, but often not only harmless, but invigorating, if you pitch into them.

Advice is like kissing: it costs nothing and is a pleasant thing to do.

I have never known a person to live to be one hundred and be remarkable for anything else.

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.

If you believe you can do something, then you can acquire the ability to do it even if you didn't have it in the beginning.

If the world despises a hypocrite, what must they think of him in heaven?

It ain't no disgrace for a man to fall, but to lie there and grunt is.

The best condition in life is to be not so rich as to be envied nor so poor as to be damned.