Top 100 Jest's Quotes
#2. The secret of a poem, no less than a jest's prosperity, lies in the ear of him that hears it.
Edgar Allan Poe
#3. A jest's prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it.
William Shakespeare
#4. It's all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#5. Tom read, - "Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."
"Them's good words, enough," said the woman; "who says 'em?"
"The Lord," said Tom.
"I jest wish I know'd whar to find Him," said the woman.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#6. Are you an evolutionist?
I'm an absurdist, ma'am. But let's suppose evolution is true; what about the monkeys today? Why can't we see them evolving? Are they still evolving?
Harrison Wheeler
#7. O jest unseen, inscrutable, invisible, As a nose on a man's face, or a weathercock on a steeple.
William Shakespeare
#8. She, that will with kittens jest, Should bear a kitten's joke.
William Cowper
#10. I always jest to people, the Oval Office is the kind of place where people stand outside, they're getting ready to come in and tell me what for, and they walk in and get overwhelmed in the atmosphere, and they say, man, you're looking pretty.
George W. Bush
#11. Some things are jest too big to fergive.
Moira Young
#12. Well, we all gotta die. You jest gotta hope you die good.
Moira Young
#13. One to be a murderer. One to be a Martyr. One to be a Monarch. One to go Mad
Marissa Meyer
#14. If now the all-mother sends forth her children without protection to a thousand threatening dangers, this can only be because she knows that if they fall they fall back into her womb, where they are safe; therefore their fall is a mere jest.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#15. When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.
Rudyard Kipling
#17. But it must be borne in mind that, if there is a Scylla before me, there is also a Charybdis - and that, in my fear of being read as a jest, I may incur the darker destiny of not being read at all.
Lewis Carroll
#19. Listen closely as those around you speak; great truths are revealed in jest.
Javan
#20. Merriment is always the effect of a sudden impression. The jest which is expected is already destroyed.
Samuel Johnson
#22. Jest when we stopped wanting to kill ourselves, we started to die.
David Levithan
#23. Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurled: / The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
Alexander Pope
#24. I'm a big believer that your word is your wand. You know how people say things like, 'Oh my gosh, I'm such an idiot.' I don't say things like that anymore. Those put-downs, even if they're in jest, are little bullets of negativity that you don't need in your life.
Mariska Hargitay
#25. Surely this feisty, argumentative female could not be his life mate? Docile, he'd specifically written docile when he'd filled in his request for a mate. And this was who the spirits of his ancestors had chosen? A celestial jest on their part perhaps?
Eve Langlais
#26. Let us never adopt the maxim, Rather lose our friend than our jest.
Quintilian
#27. Heaven to me's a fair blue stretch of sky, Earth's jest a dusty road.
John Masefield
#28. Oh, don't sit there blushin, he says, git on with it. Life's too short. Take her off in the bushes, my friend, an make her yer own. If you don't, somebody else will. Hell, I might jest make a play fer her myself. That 'ud put a rocket in yer pocket. Ha ha! How's about it, Red? You an me?
Moira Young
#29. The Skeleton
Chattering finch and water-fly
Are not merrier than I;
Here among the flowers I lie
Laughing everlastingly.
No: I may not tell the best;
Surely, friends, I might have guessed
Death was but the good King's jest,
It was hid so carefully.
G.K. Chesterton
#30. I watch my heart disappearing into her rosebud mouth. My Valentine's jest somehow seems less funny.
Neil Gaiman
#31. A person gets from a symbol the meaning he puts into it, and what is one man's comfort and inspiration is another's jest and scorn.
Robert H. Jackson
#32. You're jest a-teasin' yourself up to cry. I don' know what's come at you. Our folks ain't never did that. They took what come to 'em dry-eyed.
John Steinbeck
#33. You're jest one person, an' they's a lot of other folks. You git to your proper place. I knowed people built theirself up with sin till they figgered they was big mean shucks in the sight a the Lord. You ain't big enough or mean enough to worry God much.
John Steinbeck
#34. So, what's the status?" said Ira as he pulled himself down to his couch.
"Will is turning into a starship," Hugo replied, clearly only half in jest. "We're about to watch history in the making.
Alex Lamb
#35. Stephen kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.
Stephen's kiss was lost in jest,
Robin's lost in play,
But the kiss in Colin's eyes
Haunts me night and day.
Sara Teasdale
#36. He's got one thick book. He's in the middle of Infinite Jest. You ever heard of it?
Gabrielle Zevin
#37. Logan's gaze swung back to Galen. His eyes crinkled in the corners and a genuine smile appeared. "Did you just make a jest? Galen Shaw, you surprise me." "I have to do something to save myself from Hayden.
Donna Grant
#38. I say that in jest a little bit, but Donald Trump is a blue collar guy with a balance sheet. That's the way he likes to have fun.
Donald Trump Jr.
#39. Regret and guilt are useless emotions that hold ye in a past that's already gone . . . and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that allowing yerself to be dragged down by the past helps no one. It jest keeps ye from ha'ing both feet in the present where ye should be.
Lynsay Sands
#40. I fear I must warn you, if that ladle finds it's way to her lips, we will be revisited by my lunch," Ichabod stated without the slightest hint of a jest. "And mine will provide it company," Rip seconded.
Stacey Rourke
#41. LEIA Thou truly art in jest. Art thou not small Of stature, if thou art a stormtrooper? Does Empire shrink for want of taller troops? The Empire's evil ways, I'll grant, are grand, But must its soldiers want for fear of height?
Ian Doescher
#42. A man renowned for repartee will seldom scruple to make free with friendship's finest feeling, will thrust a dagger at your breast, and say he wounded you in jest, by way of balm for healing.
William Cowper
#43. In France everything is a matter for jest. People make quips about the scaffold, about Napoleon's defeat on the banks of The Beresina, and about the barricades of our revolutions. So, at the assizes of the Last Judgment, there will always be a Frenchmen to crack a joke.
Honore De Balzac
#44. Of all the grief's that harass the distressed; sure the most bitter is a scornful jest.
Samuel Johnson
#45. I am just a poor boy, though my story's seldom told, and I have squandered my resistance, for a pocket full of mumbles, such are promises. All lies in jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest ... la-la-la-la-la-la-la-lala-la-la-la-la ...
Paul Simon
#46. As true as God's own word is true; Nor earth, nor hell, with all their crew, Against us shall prevail. A jest, and by-word, are they grown; God is with us, we are his own, Our victory cannot fail.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#47. My Own Epitaph
Life's a jest, and all things show it.
I thought so once, and now I know it.
John Gay
#48. When thou dost tell another's jest, therein Omit the oaths, which true wit cannot need; Pick out of tales the mirth, but not the sin.
George Herbert
#49. Ain't the best prayin' jest bein' with God and talkin' a while, like He's a good friend, stead a-like he runs a store and you've come in a-hopin' to git a bargain?
Olive Ann Burns
#50. Jody said, "Ma, you're shore good."
"Oh, yes. When it's rations."
"Well, I'd a heap ruther you was good about rations and mean about other things."
"Oh, I be mean, be I?"
"Only about jest a very few things," he soothed her.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#51. Heretics are wicked, but they're mighty int'resting. It's jest that they've got sorter lost looking for God, being under the impression that He's hard to find - which He ain't never.
Lucy Maud Montgomery
#52. Love is a sacred mystery.
To those who love, it remains forever wordless;
But to those who do not love, it may be but a heartless jest.
Khalil Gibran
#53. You have my heart, Jest. I don't know if you deserve it or not. I can't tell if you're a hero or a villain, but it doesn't seem to matter. Either way, my heart is yours.
Marissa Meyer
#54. Question: What is he? Answer: A sluggard; how very pleasant it would have been to hear that of oneself! It would mean that I was positively defined, it would mean that there was something to say about me. "Sluggard" - why, it is a calling and vocation, it is a career. Do not jest, it is so.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#55. Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no choice but to say you like it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life,
Gabrielle Zevin
#56. I don't believe that there is a human creature in his senses, arrived to maturity, that at some time or other has not been carried away by this passion (sc. envy) in good earnest; yet I never met with any one who dared own he was guilty of it but in jest.
Bernard De Mandeville
#57. Unfortunately he was one of those who always tend to take their own fancies seriously; and in whose otherwise legitimate extravagance there is too little of the juice of the jest.
G.K. Chesterton
#59. War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#60. The Irish always jest even though they jest with tears.
Katharine Tynan
#61. To smile at the jest which plants a thorn in another's breast is to become a principal in the mischief.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
#62. Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.
Aristotle.
#63. Too late she saw: what she'd favored him with in jest he had received with adoration.
John Barth
#64. The jest loses its point when he who makes it is the first to laugh.
Friedrich Schiller
#65. Remember Henry Adam's jest that the succession of presidents from Washington to Grant disproved the theory of evolution?
George Will
#66. A husband and wife should resolve never to wrangle with each other; never to bandy words or indulge in the least ill-humour. Never! I say; NEVER. Wrangling, even in jest, and putting on an air of ill-humour merely to tease, becomes earnest by practice.
Timothy Shay Arthur
#67. The hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#69. Yet is it not the heart but the members of play that elevate us above the beasts: the fingers with which we touch the clavichord or the flute, the tongue with which we jest and lie and seduce. Lacking members of play, what is there left for beasts to do when they are bored but sleep?
J.M. Coetzee
#70. Judge of a jest when you have done laughing.
Robert Lloyd
#71. And you can use that sword, Weland Godfredson?"
"As a woman can use her tongue, lord."
"You're that good, eh?" Ragnar asked, as ever unable to resist a jest.
Bernard Cornwell
#72. I had to face: I had chosen. My choice, this was love. I had chosen I think the way out of the chains of the cage. I needed this woman. Without her to choose over myself, there was only pain and not choosing, rolling drunkenly and making fantasies of death.
David Foster Wallace
#73. I liked, as I like still, to make words look self-conscious and foolish, to bind them by mock marriage of a pun, to turn them inside out, to come upon them unawares. What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do god and devil combine to form a live dog?
Vladimir Nabokov
#74. He had finished and collected the three years of drafts [of Infinite Jest], and finally sat down and typed the whole thing. Wallace didn't really type; he input the giant thing twice, with one finger. But a really fast finger.
David Lipsky
#75. Consider me no fool because my tongue is mad. I salt a truth with jest that it sound not dull and heavy. There is more than jig and cadence in my words. I am of stronger fiber than you think. If there comes a time for proof I shall not fail.
Charles S. Brooks
#76. Fate does not jest and events are not a matter of chance. There is no existence out of nothing.
Gamal Abdel Nasser
#77. A prison! heav'ns, I loath the hated name,
Famine's metropolis, the sink of shame,
A nauseous sepulchre, whose craving womb
Hourly inters poor mortals in its tomb;
By ev'ry plague and ev'ry ill possess'd,
Ev'n purgatory itself to thee 's a jest.
Tom Brown Jr.
#78. Man is a living lie
a bitter jest Upon himself
a conscious grain of sand Lost in a desert of unconsciousness.
Amos Bronson Alcott
#79. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
Annie Dillard
#80. I have never injured anybody with a mordant poem; my
verse contains charges against nobody. Ingenuous, I have
shunned wit steeped in venom
not a letter of mine is dipped
in poisonous jest.
Ovid
#81. But jest apart
what virtue canst thou trace
In that broad trim that hides thy sober face?
Does that long-skirted drab, that over-nice
And formal clothing, prove a scorn of vice?
Then for thine accent
what in sound can be
So void of grace as dull monotony?
George Crabbe
#82. Blah, blah, blah. Demon boy, I can't speak that language. Furthermore, I don't want to pollute my brain by learning it. So it's time for you to learn mine. First lesson-I'm Say-been. I'm oft described as byoo-tee-full and mah-jest'ick.
Kresley Cole
#83. If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#84. We ain't got time fer you to yell at me or fer me to tell you everythin that's happened, so I'm jest gonna cover the main points real quick an then I'm gonna kiss you, he says.
Moira Young
#85. The one from among the Muslims who recites the Qur'an but in the end finds his way to hell, is considerd to be among those that have taken the word of Allah in jest.
Ali Ibn Abi Talib
#86. Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee Jest, and youthful Jollity, Quips, and Cranks, and wanton Wiles, Nods, and Becks, and wreathed Smiles, Such as hang on Hebe's cheek, And love to live in dimple sleek; Sport that wrinkled Care derides, And Laughter holding both his sides.
John Milton
#87. My mood, I say, was one of exaltation. I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on the back, fling people's hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage.
H.G.Wells
#88. Here's a proposal, offered only partly in jest: no resident of the United States, whether born here or abroad, should get to be a citizen until age 18, at which time each such resident has to take a test.
Eric Liu
#89. His jest shall savour but a shallow wit, when thousands more weep than did laugh it.
William Shakespeare
#91. It is a great affront to God to jest with sacred things, particularly to make sport with the word and ordinances of God, or to treat them with lightness,
Matthew Henry
#94. For the murder of Jest, the court joker of Hearts, I sentence this man to death.'
She spoke without feeling, unburdened by love or dreams or the pain of a broken heart. It was a new day in Hearts, and she was the Queen.
'Off with his head
Marissa Meyer
#95. If you must mount the gallows, give a jest to the crowd, a coin the hangman, and make the drop with a smile on your lips.
Robert Jordan
#96. He swatted at her with his book. "Shut up and read, will you?"
He lay back down and closed his eyes. Emma glanced over to check that he was smiling, and smiled too.
David Nicholls
#97. The essence of obscenity is the turning of the inner mystery into a jest.
Fulton J. Sheen
#98. Infinite Jest is a masterpiece," Harvey had said. "Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no choice but to say you like it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life," A.J.
Gabrielle Zevin
#99. The hapless wit has his labors always to begin, the call for novelty is never satisfied, and one jest only raises expectation of another.
Samuel Johnson
#100. Man's life is but a jest,
A dream, a shadow, bubble, air, a vapor at the best.
George Walter
