Wit & humor quotes, explained

A saying from the recovery movement of the early 1980s. There is no trace of it in Einstein's papers, letters or interviews.

Art is not meant to teach, preach or serve a practical purpose. Its value is that it is beautiful and gives pleasure, the way a flower does.

If you spend even a little less than you earn, you are fine. If you spend even a little more, you are in trouble. The size of the gap matters less than which side of the line you are on.

A witty push to be authentic. It is not found anywhere in Wilde's works; the earliest known exact match is anonymous and from 1999, a century after his death.

Polonius declares that being brief is the essence of intelligence, in the middle of one of the longest-winded speeches in the play. “Wit” meant good sense, not just humor.

Jo March grumbles that Christmas is ruined because the family is too poor for gifts. The rest of the chapter shows the sisters discovering that giving to others makes the day.

Being too nosy can get you into trouble. It is usually said as a light warning to someone asking too many questions.

Churchill did say this in Parliament in 1947, but in longer words and with a twist most people miss. He introduced it as something “that has been said,” not as his own invention.

The catchphrase of Sherlock Holmes, which he never says in the original stories. Holmes does say “Elementary” and “my dear Watson,” but never together.

Said, usually as a joke, when two people have the same idea at the same time. It flatters both of them.

The calm radio call from Apollo 13 after an oxygen tank exploded. The real words were “we've had a problem,” said first by Jack Swigert and repeated by Jim Lovell.

A wry aside in a letter about the new U.S. Constitution. Franklin made it famous, but the joke was already in print more than seventy years earlier.

Austen's narrator states a “universal truth” that is really a joke: it is the families of single women who want a rich bachelor, not the bachelor who wants a wife.

Telemachus, whose father Odysseus left for war when he was a baby, says he has only his mother's word for who his father is. No child can be completely sure.

A joke turned into a proverb: even a father may not truly know his child. Shakespeare reverses the older saying that it is a wise child who knows its own father.

A story about an unnamed “great princess” in Rousseau's memoirs, written when Marie Antoinette was about ten years old and living in Vienna. Revolutionary-era propaganda and later writers attached it to her.

Everyone makes good resolutions on January 1 and breaks them within days. Twain teases his readers that they will soon be “paving hell” with their good intentions, as they do every year.

Latin for “Who will guard the guards themselves?” Today it asks who keeps the powerful honest when they are the ones meant to keep everyone else in line.

Twain's joke when a newspaper wrongly reported he was dying. His real words were drier: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

An old joke about a cold summer, retold about many cities. Twain's papers contain nothing like it about San Francisco, though he did once retell an older version about Paris.

A teenager thinks his father knows nothing. A few years later, grown up, he realizes his father was wise all along. The joke is that it was the son who changed.