"Humourist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Buzzer is a humourist, of the sardonic variety. The constant clash of wits over the wires, and the necessity of framing words quickly, sharpens his faculties and acidulates his tongue. Incidentally, he is an awkward person to quarrel with. One black night, Bobby Little, making his second round ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... to me, Miss Cox, as if the wind was a settin' from Bedlam, or may be Colney Hatch," said John, who was considered a humourist among his comrades. "I wouldn't take no liberties with a lady, Miss Cox; but if I might be so bold as to arst the joke of ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... of the reign of Elizabeth to the end of Charles II. He is indeed all this; and what he has more than all this peculiar to himself, I seem to convey to my own mind in some measure by saying,—that he is a quiet and sublime enthusiast with a strong tinge of the fantast,—the humourist constantly mingling with, and flashing across, the philosopher, as the darting colours in shot silk play upon the main dye. In short, he has brains in his head which is all the more interesting for a little twist in the brains. He sometimes reminds the reader ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... advertised for a Master of Arts. His irritation would have increased if the Art Master had promised him a sea-piece and had brought him a piece of the sea; or if, during the decoration of his house, the same aesthetic humourist had undertaken to procure some Indian Red and had produced ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... the genius of the two men was entirely different. Wilde was a humourist and a humanist before everything; and his wittiest jests have neither the relentlessness nor the keenness characterising those of the clever American artist. Again, Whistler could no more have obtained the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek, nor have written The Importance of Being Earnest, nor The ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... justice to Johnson's intense tenderness, if we did not see how often it was masked by an irritability pardonable in itself, and not affecting the deeper springs of action. To bring out the beauty of a character by means of its external oddities is the triumph of a kindly humourist; and Boswell would have acted as absurdly in suppressing Johnson's weaknesses, as Sterne would have done had he made Uncle Toby a perfectly sound and rational person. But to see this required an insight so rare that it is wanting in nearly all the biographers ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... it, he died of heart trouble. He received at the hands of the Jesuits a classical education. A Latinist, he was erudite as were few of his artistic contemporaries. The mystic strain in him did not betray itself until his third period. He was an accomplished humourist and could generally cap Latin verses with D'Aurevilly or Huysmans. Tertullian's De Cultu Feminarum he must have read, for many of his plates are illustrations of the learned Bishop of Carthage's attitude toward ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... collectors, and he was unrepentant, and, moreover, he was "not careful" to incur a charge of indifference to the fine arts in general. Among the "crowd" which found their place in his complex personality, there was "the barbarian," and there was "the philistine," and there was, too, the humourist who took a subtle pleasure in proclaiming himself "a plain man," puzzled by subtleties, and unable to catch the drift of spirits ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... was before all things a great humourist—doubtless the greatest of this century; for, though we may find in Scott a more truly Shakespearean humour of the highest order, the humour of Dickens is so varied, so paramount, so inexhaustible, that he stands forth in our memory as the humourist of the age. Swift, Fielding, Hogarth, Sterne, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... by a curious analogy with Theophile Gautier, was, in these days, a humourist as well as a poet. In the midst of his mad fancies and rare melodies he is laughing at himself, as Theophile mocked at Les Jeunes France. The psychological position is, therefore, one of the rarest. ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... I was springing away from her into the bushes; and so had led me home triumphant, holding on tight to the rope of hair, and muttering with a broad smile of special satisfaction, "Diesmal wirst du mir aber nicht entschlupfen!" Fraulein Wundermacher, now I came to think of it, must have been a humourist. She was certainly a clever and a capable woman. But I wished at that moment that she would not haunt me so persistently, and that I could get rid of the feeling that she was just behind in her galoshes, ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... not, sir. He has a high reputation, and a good deal of experience, but he is a humourist; and what is something, though you will pardon it, he is not ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... impossible now," explained those who spoke, I knew, words of wisdom, of experience. "The world would never listen to you. Once a humourist always a humourist. As well might a comic actor insist upon playing Hamlet. It might be the best Hamlet ever seen upon the stage; the audience would only ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... displayed; for Shakespear has contrived all the incidents to illustrate the gluttony, lewdness, cowardice, and boastfulness of the fat old knight: and Jonson, has, with equal art, displayed the oddity of a wimsical humourist, who could endure no ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... But Fate, that arch-humourist, that jester of the gods, delights in mighty contrasts, and has a trick of exalting us by false hopes and hollow lures on the very eve of working our discomfiture. From the soul that but a moment back had been aglow with ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... his voice grated on my ears. His manner to a servant who waited upon him seemed harsh and irritable. I found it impossible to believe that his acquaintance with spirituality was either intimate or real. Saints ought to be gentlemen. He seemed to me a vulgar old man, a clumsy old humourist, an intolerant, ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... each and all of them! It had seemed an absurdly inadequate direction, even as we had talked the narrative over in John Saunders's snuggery. But, confronted with so many "large cabbage-wood stumps," one began to suspect Henry P. Tobias of having been a humourist, and to wonder whether John Saunders was not right after all, and the whole manuscript merely a hoax for the benefit ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... of the Spectator's Club, the dramatis personae introduced in the Tatler do not occupy a very prominent place in the development of the work. Isaac Bickerstaff himself, an old man of sixty-four, "a philosopher, an humourist, an astrologer, and a censor," is rather vaguely sketched, and his familiar, Pacolet, is made use of chiefly in the earlier numbers. The occasional references to Bickerstaff's half-sister, Jenny Distaff,[13] and her husband, Tanquillus, ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... and hopeless his adventure is, Who seeks for jocularities that haven't yet been said; The world has joked incessantly for over fifty centuries, And every joke that's possible has long ago been made. I started as a humourist with lots of mental fizziness, But humour is a drug which it's the fashion to abuse; For my stock-in-trade, my fixtures and the good-will of the business No reasonable offer I am likely to refuse. And if anybody choose He may circulate the news That no ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... termagant, and taming her into a meek and manageable wife. And truly none was so fit to set about this herculean labour as Petruchio, whose spirit was as high as Katharine's, and he was a witty and most happy-tempered humourist, and withal so wise, and of such a true judgment, that he well knew how to feign a passionate and furious deportment, when his spirits were so calm that himself could have laughed merrily at his own angry feigning, for his natural ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... a humourist and a peaceful man. Going down the hill he met Porson and Wainwright. "Either that man is a genius or he is a dangerous lunatic," said he. "Just go up and look at his green." And he continued his way, his countenance brightened by a pleasant anticipation ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... have their doubts of a Pax Germanica and saw signs rather of a Wash-out Germanicum. Things looked ill with them, so they consulted their doctor, a certain person who called himself "Dr. Help-us" by way of a jest. He proved more successful as a business man, however, than he was as a humourist. He advised that the "War of World Conquest" was not likely to produce a dividend, because its name was against it. Cut out "Imperialism"; substitute another word, with just as many syllables and no less an imposing sound, "Proletariat"; call the thing "Class Warfare"; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... being so delightful that he can't leave it—he proceeds to recommend, in place of venison for squires' tables, "the bodies of young lads and maidens not exceeding fourteen or under twelve." Amiable humourist! laughing castigator of morals! There was a process well known and practised in the Dean's gay days: when a lout entered the coffee-house, the wags proceeded to what they called "roasting" him. This is roasting a subject with a vengeance. The Dean had a native genius for it. As the Almanach ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with a Mr. Clare, who inhabited the next house to that which was tenanted by her father, and to whom she was probably in some degree indebted for the early cultivation of her mind. Mr. Clare was a clergyman, and appears to have been a humourist of a very singular cast. In his person he was deformed and delicate; and his figure, I am told, bore a resemblance to that of the celebrated Pope. He had a fondness for poetry, and was not destitute of taste. His manners were expressive of a tenderness and benevolence, the demonstrations ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... princess Amelia was present, she was led from his extraordinary appearance, to inquire his name, family, and pursuits: she received information amongst the answers to her inquiries, that he had been originally intended for the church. "Rather for the steeple," replied the royal humourist. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... care of his invaluable life, and hint that if any calamity occurred to him, the campaign would ipso facto come to an end. Andreas knew that MacGahan was quizzing him, but it was exceedingly droll how he purred and bridled under the light touch of that genial humourist, whose merits his own countrymen, to my thinking, have never adequately recognised. The old story of a prophet having scant honour ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... was in those days quite thin and slender, with a delicate rosebud completion and a disposition to connubial badinage, to a sort of gentle skylarking. There was a silvery ghost of lisping in her speech. She was a great humourist, and as the constraint of my presence at meals wore off, I became more and more aware of a filmy but extensive net of nonsense she had woven about her domestic relations until it had become the reality of her life. She affected ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells |
