A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.

In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

My philosophy is, it’s always very rewarding when you can make an audience laugh. I don’t mind making fun of myself. I like self-deprecating comedy. But I’d like you to laugh with me occasionally, too.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

If Everton were playing down the bottom of my garden, I’d draw the curtains.

The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you’ll live 10 times longer than if you have 10. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever. It’s truly ridiculous.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed – chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones.

I think I have always had a little humor.

I have a very strict gun control policy: if there’s a gun around, I want to be in control of it.

Chris Rock does the political thing really well, but that never worked for me.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death… these are things that unite us all.

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

Everyone has at least one story, and each of us is funny if we admit it. You have to admit you’re the funniest person you’ve ever heard of.

There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.

I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.

If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.

I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one’s wife happy. First, let her think she’s having her own way. And second, let her have it.

A person who can’t pay gets another person who can’t pay to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don’t make either of them able to do a walking-match.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

I’ve always had to conquer fear when I’m on stage. Basically, I was and still am a very shy person. It’s absolutely in conflict with what I do. But once I deliver the first joke I’m okay. It’s like I’m out there all by myself just delivering my lines to nobody in particular without ever trying to notice the audience in front of me.

In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times.

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

Humor is the most engaging cowardice.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.

The land created me. I’m wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I’m more at home in the vacant lots.

I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.

Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

The extreme weakness of quantum gravitational effects now poses some philosophical problems; maybe nature is trying to tell us something new here: maybe we should not try to quantize gravity.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

Happy the man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, content to breathe his native air in his own ground.

Good jokes are gems. A good idea is hard to come by. I couldn’t give them to someone else, even for money. It just wouldn’t seem right.

An onion can make people cry but there’s never been a vegetable that can make people laugh.

If you can make a girl laugh, you can make her do anything.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

It doesn’t make a difference what temperature a room is, it’s always room temperature.

It’s very interesting, the joke comes first and then the wording comes within five seconds, maybe ten seconds. My thing is to get the joke across in as few words as possible. However, sometimes a word that’s not really needed does help the rhythm of it. It’s a gut feeling.

To me, comedy is just twisting reality. It’s commenting or observing or twisting life.

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.

Whenever a fellow tells me he’s bipartisan, I know he’s going to vote against me.

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.

Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.

I’ve been in love with the same woman for forty-one years. If my wife finds out, she’ll kill me.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.