Top 100 Josh Billings Sayings
#1. Josh Billings wrote, "It's not what a man knows that hurts him; it's what he knows that isn't true.
Brian Tracy
#2. Josh Billings said, It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems.
John W. Gardner
#3. Josh Billings once wrote, It ain't what a man knows what hurts him. It's what he knows what ain't true.
Brian Tracy
#4. The only reason for being a writer, is that you can't help it.
Josh Billings
John F. Beckman
#5. The man who has never been tempted doesn't know how dishonest he is.
Josh Billings
#6. Admiration is a youthful fancy will which scarcely ever survives to mature years.
Josh Billings
#7. The happiest time in a man's life is when he is in the red hot pursuit of a dollar with a reasonable prospect of overtaking it.
Josh Billings
#8. If you would make yourself agreeable wherever you go, listen to the grievances of others but never relate your own.
Josh Billings
#10. Put an Englishman into the garden of Eden, and he would find fault with the whole blasted concern; put a Yankee in, and he would see where he could alter it to advantage; put an Irishman in, and he would want to boss the thing; put a Dutchman in, and he would proceed to plant it.
Josh Billings
#12. Silence is said to be golden, but the best fools the world has ever produced had nothing to say on the subject
Josh Billings
#13. The trouble with most folks isn't their ignorance. It's knowin' so many things that ain't so.
Josh Billings
#14. Contentment is a kind of moral laziness; if there wasn't anything but contentment in his world, man wouldn't be any more of a success than an angleworm is
Josh Billings
#15. There's one good thing about tight shoes; they make you forget your other troubles.
Josh Billings
#16. Rumor is like bees; the more you fight them the more you don't get rid of them.
Josh Billings
#17. It's a wise man who profits by his own experience, but it's a good deal wiser one who lets the rattlesnake bite the other fellow.
Josh Billings
#18. It strains a man's philosophy the worst kind to laugh when he gets beat.
Josh Billings
#21. Economy is a savings-bank, into which men drop pennies, and get dollars in return.
Josh Billings
#22. I think when the full horror of being fifty hits you, you should stay home and have a good cry.
Josh Billings
#23. It is better to know nothing than to know what ain't so.
Josh Billings
#24. Never work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first.
Josh Billings
#25. Life is short, but it's long enough to ruin any man who wants to be ruined.
Josh Billings
#27. Zoroaster said, when in doubt abstain; but this does not always apply. At cards, when in doubt take the trick.
Josh Billings
#28. It's not ignorance does so much damage; it's knowin' so derned much that ain't so.
Josh Billings
#29. Experience makes more timid men than it does wise ones.
Josh Billings
#30. There is gravity in wisdom, but no particular wisdom in gravity.
Josh Billings
#31. I hold that a man has as much right to spell a word as it is pronounced as he has to pronounce it the way it ain't spelled.
Josh Billings
#32. Threescore years and ten is enough; if a man can't suffer all the misery he wants in that time, he must be numb.
Josh Billings
#33. In the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money cannot buy ... to wit
the wag of a dog's tail.
Josh Billings
#34. Don't have any more secrets than you can keep yourself.
Josh Billings
#35. Metaphysics is the science of proving what we don't understand.
Josh Billings
#36. A learned fool is one who has read everything and simply remembered it.
Josh Billings
#37. A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.
Josh Billings
#38. What the world wants iz [sic] good examples, not so mutch advice; advice may be wrong, but examples prove themselves.
Josh Billings
#39. Time is like money, the less we have of it to spare the further we make it go.
Josh Billings
#40. Caution, though very often wasted is a good risk to take.
Josh Billings
#41. I would much rather always look forward to the time when I am going to ride in a carriage, than to look back on the time when I used to.
Josh Billings
#42. The miser and the glutton are two facetious buzzards: one hides his store, and the other stores his hide.
Josh Billings
#44. You can reach stupidity only with a cannon ball.
Josh Billings
#46. There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.
Josh Billings
#47. The truly innocent are those who not only are guiltless themselves but who think others are.
Josh Billings
#48. Music wasn't made to make us wise, but better natured.
Josh Billings
#49. It's not so hard to get rich as it is to know when you have gotten rich.
Josh Billings
#50. There is a significant Latin proverb; to wit: Who will guard the guards?
Josh Billings
#52. When a young man begins to go down hill everything seems to be greased for the occasion.
Josh Billings
#54. A good place to visit, but a poor place to stay.
Josh Billings
#55. Virtue does not consist in the absence of the passions, but in the control of them.
Josh Billings
#56. As a general rule, if you want to get at the truth - hear both sides and believe neither.
Josh Billings
#57. If the world despises a hypocrite, what must they think of him in heaven?
Josh Billings
#58. There is only one good substitute for the endearments of a sister, and that is the endearments of some other fellow's sister.
Josh Billings
#59. Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well
Josh Billings
#60. True wisdom is plenty of experience, observation, and reflection. False wisdom is plenty of ignorance, arrogance, and impudence.
Josh Billings
#61. Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.
Josh Billings
#62. When the truth is in your way, you are on the wrong road.
Josh Billings
#63. Silence is one of the hardest kind of arguments to refute. There is no good substitute for wisdom; but silence is the best that has yet been discovered.
Josh Billings
#64. Common sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius
Josh Billings
#65. Never run into debt, not if you can find anything else to run into.
Josh Billings
#66. Genius ain't anything more than elegant common sense
Josh Billings
#67. The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.
Josh Billings
#68. Beauty is a very handy thing to have, especially for a woman who ain't handsome.
Josh Billings
#69. Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt of, not swallowed.
Josh Billings
#70. The best time for you to hold your tongue is the time you feel you must say something or bust.
Josh Billings
#71. There is not a whole lot of fun in medicine but there is a whole lot of medicine in fun.
Josh Billings
#73. Sekts and creeds ov religion, are like pocket compesses, good enuff tu pinte out the direction, but the nearer the pole yu git thewuss tha wurk.
Josh Billings
#74. Prejudice is a house-plant which is very apt to wilt if you take it out-of-doors among folks.
Josh Billings
#76. It ain't no disgrace for a man to fall, but to lie there and grunt is.
Josh Billings
#78. One of the rarest things that a man ever does, is to do the best he can.
Josh Billings
#79. Marrying for love may be a bit risky, but it is so honest that God can't help but smile on it.
Josh Billings
#80. Morally considered, laughter is next to the Ten Commandments.
Josh Billings
#81. Better make a weak man your enemy than your friend.
Josh Billings
#82. Learning sleeps and snores in libraries, but wisdom is everywhere, wide awake, on tiptoe.
Josh Billings
#83. Prejudice assumes the garb of reason, but the cheat is too thin.
Josh Billings
#84. Rumor is a vagrant without a home, and lives upon what it can pick up.
Josh Billings
#85. A slander is like a hornet; if you cannot kill it dead at the first blow, better not to strike at it.
Josh Billings
#86. The wheel that squeaks the loudest is the one that gets the grease.
Josh Billings
#87. I don't never have any trouble in regulating my own conduct, but to keep other folks' straight is what bothers me.
Josh Billings
#88. Laughing is the sensation of feeling good all over and showing it principally in one spot.
Josh Billings
#91. Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.
Josh Billings
#92. Knowledge is like money: the more he gets, the more he craves.
Josh Billings
#93. The man who ain't got an enemy is really poor.
Josh Billings
#95. I don't care how much a man talks, if he only says it in a few words.
Josh Billings
#96. The more humble a man is before God the more he will be exalted; the more humble he is before man, the more he will get rode roughshod.
Josh Billings
#97. When a man gets talking about himself, he seldom fails to be eloquent and often reaches the sublime.
Josh Billings
#98. There is no passion of the human heart that promises so much and pays so little as revenge.
Josh Billings
#99. When good-natured people leave us we look forward with extra pleasure to their return.
Josh Billings
#100. It is a great deal easier for a man to find a pedigree to fit his virtues than virtues to fit his pedigree.
Josh Billings
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