Top 147 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Benchley
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American comedian Robert Benchley.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.
You might think that after thousands of years of coming up too soon and getting frozen, the crocus family would have had a little sense knocked into it.
A real hangover is nothing to try out family remedies on. The only cure for a real hangover is death.
Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with that it's compounding a felony.
We are constantly being surprised that people did things well before we were born.
A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down.
Other men wear white suits in summer and it doesn't seem to bother them. But my white suit seems to be a little whiter than theirs. I think also that it may have something written on the back of it, although I can't find it when I take the suit off.
Anyone who tries to keep track of what is happening in China is going to end up by wearing all the skin of his left ear from twirling around on it.
I do most of my work sitting down; that's where I shine.
Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?
Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed be doing at that moment.
Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
We call ourselves a free nation, and yet we let ourselves be told what cabs we can and can't take by a man at a hotel door, simply because he has a drum major's uniform on.
There is a note in the front of the volume saying that no public reading may be given without first getting the author's permission. It ought to be made much more difficult to do than that.
I know I'm drinking myself to a slow death, but then I'm in no hurry.
I have been told by hospital authorities that more copies of my works are left behind by departing patients than those of any other author.
The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.
An ardent supporter of the hometown team should go to a game prepared to take offense, no matter what happens.
The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.
For a nation which has an almost evil reputation for bustle, bustle, bustle, and rush, rush, rush, we spend an enormous amount of time standing around in line in front of windows, just waiting.
If Mr. Einstein doesn't like the natural laws of the universe, let him go back to where he came from.
In America there are two classes of travel - first class, and with children.
Nothing makes a man feel older than to hear a band coming up the street and not to have the impulse to rush downstairs and out on to the sidewalk.
Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.
At fifteen one is first beginning to realize that everything isn't money and power in this world, and is casting about for joys that do not turn to dross in one's hands.
In a house where there are small children the bathroom soon takes on the appearance of the Old Curiosity Shop.
Dachshunds are ideal dogs for small children, as they are already stretched and pulled to such a length that the child cannot do much harm one way or the other.
Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.
There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them.
Most of the arguments to which I am party fall somewhat short of being impressive, owing to the fact that neither I nor my opponent knows what we are talking about.
I have tried to know absolutely nothing about a great many things, and I have succeeded fairly well.
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get a new book out of him each year.
Even nowadays a man can't step up and kill a woman without feeling just a bit unchivalrous.
A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.
Tell us your phobias and we will tell you what you are afraid of.
If you are one of the hewers of wood and drawers of small weekly paychecks, your letters will have to contain some few items of news or they will be accounted dry stuff.... But if you happen to be of a literary turn of mind, or are, in any way, likely to become famous, you may settle down to an afternoon of letter-writing on nothing more sprightly in the way of news than the shifting of the wind from south to south-east.
Except for an occasional heart attack I feel as young as I ever did.
The pencil sharpener is about as far as I have ever got in operating a complicated piece of machinery with any success.
There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes and those who do not.
It was one of those plays in which all of the actors unfortunately enunciated very clearly.
The wise man thinks once before he speaks twice.
There is probably no more obnoxious class of citizen, taken end for end, than the returning vacationist.
England and America should scrap cricket and baseball and come up with a new game that they both can play. Like baseball, for example.
A man gets on a train with his little boy, and gives the conductor only one ticket. 'How old's your kid?' the conductor says, and the father says, 'He's four years old.' 'He looks at least twelve to me,' says the conductor. And the father says, 'Can I help it if he worries?
This is a test. It is only a test. Had it been an actual job, you would have received raises, promotions, and other signs of appreciation.
I am pretty sure that, if you will be quite honest, you will admit that a good rousing sneeze, one that tears open your collar and throws your hair into your eyes, is really one of life's sensational pleasures.
Anything can happen, but it usually doesn't.
But ice-crunching and loud gum-chewing, together with drumming on tables, and whistling the same tune 70 times in succession, because they indicate an indifference on the part of the perpetrator to the rest of the world in general, are not only registered on the delicate surfaces of the brain but eat little holes in it until it finally collapses or blows up.
The most common of all antagonisms arises from a man's taking a seat beside you on the train, a seat to which he is completely entitled.
This congestion in the post offices is due to what are technically known as "regulations" but what are really a series of acrostics and anagrams devised by some officials who got around a table one night and tried to be funny.
All that a spectator gets out of the game is fresh air, the comical articles in his program, the sight of twenty-two young men rushing about in mysterious formations, and whatever he brought in his flask.
Who said time machines haven't been built yet? They already exist. They're called books
Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.
I am more the inspirational type of speller. I work on hunches rather than mere facts, and the result is sometimes open to criticism by purists.
Charlemagne either died or was born or did something with the Holy Roman Empire in 800.
The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
The only cure for a real hangover is death.
The knocking out of a pipe can be made almost as important as the smoking of it, especially if there are nervous people in the room. A good, smart knock of a pipe against a tin wastebasket and you will have a neurasthenic out of his chair and into the window sash in no time.
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