"Sense of humour" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his keeper took out a letter or book and read it aloud to him; and his rage was so violent that, as I witnessed on one occasion, he bit his own leg till the blood flowed. Dogs shew what may be fairly called a sense of humour, as distinct from mere play; if a bit of stick or other such object be thrown to one, he will often carry it away for a short distance; and then squatting down with it on the ground close before ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... held "some orgy of that nature." He had apartments in the Vatican, and if it shock you to think that it pleased him, with his gentlemen, to make merry by feasting a parcel of Roman harlots, you are—if you value justice—to be shocked at the times rather than the man. The sense of humour of the Cinquecento was primitive, and in primitive humour prurience plays ever an important part, as is discernible in the literature and comedies of that age. If you would appreciate this to the full, consider Burchard's details of the masks worn at Carnival by some merry-makers ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... perfect shriek of laughter. We said it was the funniest thing we had ever heard in all our lives. We said how strange it was that, in the face of things like these, there should be a popular notion that the Germans hadn't any sense of humour. And we asked the Professor why he didn't translate the song into English, so that the common people could understand it, and hear what a real ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... guinea and a newspaper cutting entitled "A Cadger for Copy," which may appeal to some people's sense of humour. It makes none to mine. In the flap of the envelope Biddick writes: ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... could not avert the fate which was due to befall the house on January 8th, 1799, when the lease of the building and all within were disposed of by public sale. A philosophic journalist, not possessing Steele's sense of humour, gravely remarked of the Don's gimcracks that they, with kindred collections, helped to cherish the infancy of science, and deserved to be appreciated as the playthings of a boy after he is arrived at maturity. Happily the Don himself did not survive to see his precious treasures fetch ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... sods by the potting-shed. Anything more solemn than his walk, more depressing than his mien, has not been seen outside a churchyard. If he were burying the child of his old age, he could not look more cut up. SARK, who, probably owing to personal associations, is beginning to develop some sense of humour, walked by the side of him this morning whistling "The Dead March ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 22, 1890 • Various
... girl in the world. She was different from all other women. She had a deeper nature than other people. Smith realized it at once. She could feel and understand things that ordinary people couldn't. She could understand him. She had a great sense of humour and an exquisite appreciation of a joke. He told her the six that he knew one night and she thought them great. Her mere presence made Smith feel as if he had swallowed a sunset: the first time that his finger brushed against hers, he felt a thrill ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... newcomer had laid aside her furs Magda's impression qualified itself. Lady Arabella was not in the least of the "small bird" type, but rather suggested a hawk endowed with a grim sense of humour—quick and decisive in movement, with eyes that held an incalculable wisdom and laughed a thought cynically ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... that Dickens went when he was labouring with unusual difficulty over Bleak House, and lamenting his inability to "grind sparks out of this dull anvil". At Dover, on his Second Series of Readings, he found "the audience with the greatest sense of humour", and "they laughed with such really cordial enjoyment, when Squeers read the boy's letters, that the contagion" was irresistible even ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... his way in this country. He has no sense of humour. (Grace comes in. Her dress, very convenient and businesslike, is made to please herself and serve her own purposes without the slightest regard to fashion, though by no means without a careful concern for her personal elegance. She enters briskly, ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... alone with Rod Rockwell, smiled slightly. "Bill ain't got a sense of humour this mornin'," he observed, softly. "He must ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... showered upon them. The great mass of British public opinion, however, they did not touch. There was never a second flaming campaign because of Turkish atrocities towards Bulgaria, and the pro-Turks never had a sufficient sense of humour to suggest a counter-campaign when Bulgarians made reprisals. In official circles the general attitude towards Balkan affairs was one of vexation alternating ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... of their land, the two compatriots have in common a taste for picturesque anecdotes, and select them with a view of making their heroes popular; the sense of humour is not developed to an equal degree, but it is of the same quality in both; and the same kind of happy answers are enjoyed by the two. Barbour delights, and with good reason, in preserving the account of the fight in which the king, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... he was doing us boys a good turn, wrote a line to our father, telling him in a humorous manner all about this particular wretched back-bitten black bream which he had recognised, and the price he had been asked for it. Then my father, having no sense of humour, gave us, one and all, a sound thrashing for taking money from old Duggan, who thereafter sold our black bream to a hawker man who travelled around in a spring cart, and gave him three shillings each, out of which we got two, and spent at ...
— The Colonial Mortuary Bard; "'Reo," The Fisherman; and The Black Bream Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... is brief and concerned only with the dryest recital of events. After the death of Marie Ivanovna, however, its character entirely changes for reasons which he himself shows. I would have expected perhaps a certain solemnity or even pomposity in the style of it; he had never a strong sense of humour. But I find it written in the very simplest fashion; words here and there are misspelt and his handwriting is large and ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... TERRIBLE'S adventure. Not quite sure of Her Majesty's identity - I had never heard there was a Queen - I naively asked my mother, in a very audible stage-whisper, 'Who is the old lady with - ?' My mother dragged me off the instant she had made her curtsey. She had a quick sense of humour; and, judging from her laughter, when she told her story to another lady in the supper room, I fancied I had said or done something very funny. I was rather disconcerted at being seriously admonished, and told I must never again comment upon ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... last. "I think your lordship is wise enough to understand. The discovery of a sense of humour in a ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... countenance indexed a sturdy honesty of thought and a merry disposition. There was considerable strength too about brow and jaw. Leslie Grey was shorter than his companion. A man of dapper, sturdy figure, and with a face good-looking, obstinate, and displaying as much sense of humour as a barbed-wire fence post. He was fully thirty ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... have meant this is not to be dreamed; but when the true scholar gets thoroughly to work, his logic is remorseless, his art is implacable, and his sense of humour is blighted. In the rose above, Pierre had asserted the exclusive authority of Christ in the New Jerusalem, and his scheme required him to show how the Church rested on the Evangelists below, who in their turn had no visible support except what the Prophets gave them. Yet ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... the cloves out of the cracks in the stone flagging—and, of course, he needn't have done this, unless he had an abnormal sense of humour—he handed me the tattered, disreputable-looking copy of 'A Modern Circe,' with a bow that wouldn't have disgraced a Chesterfield, and then went back to his easel, while I fled after ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... who took himself very seriously. There was an air of pomposity and arrogant importance about him which—considering who and what he was—would have been entertaining to any observer gifted with a sense of humour. ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... strangers on an Australian platform, amid the heathers of Scotland, or in the Golden Gate of California, was so free and cordial that each one might have thought himself a dear friend of the Doctor, and he would have been right in thinking so. Again, his sense of humour was so great that he could laugh and "poke fun" at his critics with such ease and good humour that their arrows passed harmlessly over his head. "Men have a right to their opinions," he would genially say. "There are twenty tall pippin trees ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... sense of humour, as most of those who took part in these mock trials were certain to end their careers before a real trial unless they came to a sudden ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... wretched, not because he considered water gruel objectionable, but because he had lost his precious sense of humour, that magician who can transform the dark rye into golden wheat; almighty love, emptying his horn of plenty over his poor home, had vanished. The children had become burdens, and the once beloved wife a secret enemy despised ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss. These could find no place in Browning's presentation of Aprile, but it is certain that Browning himself was a much more complex person than the dying lover of love who became the instructor of Paracelsus. When ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... intelligent faces, unusually fair, with high foreheads, and often grey eyes. They are not, as a rule, above middle height, but they are active and hard-working and by no means deficient in courage and animal spirits, or a sense of humour. They are clannish in the extreme, and to elucidate a criminal case in which no one but Panwars are concerned, and in a Panwar village, is usually a harder task than the average local police officer can tackle. At times they are apt to affect, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... irrepressible fooling are enough to destroy Disraeli's reputation as a serious romancer. No doubt they have unfairly reacted so as to dim our sense of Disraeli's real genius as a writer. When we know Codlingsby by heart, as every one with a sense of humour must do, it is impossible for us to keep our countenance when we take up the palaver about Sidonia and the Chosen Race. The Novels by Eminent Hands are all good: they are much more than parodies; they are real criticism, sound, wise, genial, and instructive. Nor are they in the least ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... aloud. "An incompetent delightful person with Martin Leeds's sense of humour. And her powers of expression. She must be attractive to many people. She could probably do without ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... Vernon was wont to receive his countless visitors at the Palace on public days, also what a picturesque sight he then invariably presented in his full-bottomed, snow-white wig and bright, purple coat. But the good bishop, though extremely stately and impressive of demeanour, was gifted with a keen sense of humour and could enjoy a spice of frivolity when he could indulge in it without detracting from his dignity. In 1807 he was appointed to the Archbishopric of York, and was fond of retailing how a groom belonging to his old friend, Sir James Graham, [24] got news of the event and rode hard to Netherby ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... sporting-blood surging suddenly to his very finger-tips. As he gave his mare the whip and held her in from breaking, he looked once more at the figure whizzing along by his side against the western light. Something in the pink, pinched face, the red, eager eyes, appealed to his sense of humour, and he laughed aloud. Emmet had more than one reason for wishing to beat this man. He had worsted his candidate in the election, and now he would show him a clean pair of heels in the race. His heart beat with exultation ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... pages before this prodigy whom he lovingly calls Ariuro, as who should say Raffaelo or Giordano; and now, where in the hearts of men lingers Sir Arthur Duck? For one thing he had a bad name. Our English sense of humour revolts from making a popular hero of a man called Duck. Yet we made one of Drake. But there was something masculine about ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... at me more coldly than before. I don't think he liked me, and when the younger man chuckled Mackenzie glared at him. Smart had a sense of humour. ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... were not fertile, and that if only everyone of Jewish blood would marry a Christian, the country would in course of time be cleared of a race that, she solemnly assured me, is as great a curse to it, and as inferior as the negro in America. But as she was an anti-Semite with a sense of humour she admitted that the remedy was a slow one and difficult to enforce. As a matter of fact, the Jews marry mostly amongst themselves in Germany, and men are still living in Frankfurt and other large ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... that he who two centuries since rode abroad in all the glory of the High-toby-splice descends in these days of avarice and stupidity. The legislators who decreed that henceforth the rope should be reserved for the ultimate crime of murder were inspired with a proper sense of humour and proportion. It would be ignoble to dignify that ugly enterprise of to-day, the cracking of suburban cribs, with the same punishment which was meted out to Claude Duval and the immortal Switcher. Better for the churl the disgrace ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and of kindred temper with her brother, but with distinct qualities of her own; her first volume, called the "Goblin-Market," contains a number of very beautiful short poems; she exhibits, along with a sense of humour, a rare pathos, which, as Professor Saintsbury remarks, often "blends with or passes into the utterance of religious awe, unstained and unweakened by any ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... struck me in him, and, later, in many other of the younger generation of the upper classes in Persia, was the happy mixture of the utmost charm of manner with a keen business head, delightful tact and no mean sense of humour. Meftah-es-Sultaneh, for instance, spoke most interestingly for over an hour, and I was agreeably surprised to find what an excellent foreign education students can receive without leaving Persia. It is true that Meftah is an exceptionally clever man, who would ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... the young gentleman of fortin on the poop deck in his Sunday pumps!" and without more ado he let fly the water, first at my feet and then upwards, till I was soused from head to foot, and the scrubbers and swabbers laughed at my gasps as I know I could not have moved their sense of humour if I had had the finest wit in the world. However, I suppose they had had to take as well as give such merriment in their time; and I keenly remember Biddy's parting hint that the "good-nature of my ways" would be my best ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... thought, was always by his side, a ready, cheerful, courageous, wise, and sympathetic counsellor. It was she who shielded his sensitive spirit from the annoyances and trials of life, answering (for example) the innumerable letters addressed to him from all parts of the world. By her quiet sense of humour, by her selfless devotion, by ‘her faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven,’ she helped him also to the utmost in the hours of his ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... gauche might make as good a short test as any of a reader's sense of humour. But here also a possible Dantean reminiscence (not suggested to me this time) comes in; for in the lines already quoted "dalla ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... the chief deficiencies of our author—a deficiency in which perhaps his age and nation participated—was a lack of humour. It is difficult to think that anyone who possessed a keen sense of humour could have written letters so drolly unsuited to the character of Theodoric, their supposed author, as are some which we find in the 'Variae.' For instance, the King had reason to complain that Faustus, the Praetorian Praefect, was dawdling over the execution of an order ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... asked him to play with the keys covered by a piece of cloth, which he did instantly, and these musical tricks suggested by the Emperor's fancy, thereafter formed a far from unimportant part of Wolfgang's repertoire on his long concert tours, and always interested his audiences. The boy had a keen sense of humour, and always entered heartily into any joke that was made with him, but sometimes he could be very serious, as for instance, when he was called to play for the court composer, George Wagenseil, who was himself a proficient performer on the harpsichord. ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... made such a mystery about it," said Cecily, who had missed the point entirely, and couldn't see why the rest of us were laughing. But Cecily was such a darling that we did not mind her lack of a sense of humour. ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... help him, and a fussy house-master; and he had fought them all for a term, and looked like winning. Jimmy admired his friend with a fervour which nothing on earth would have tempted him to reveal. Like most people with a sense of humour, he had a fear of appearing ridiculous, and he hid his real feelings as completely as ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... was wholly destitute of a sense of humour (and therefore clearly marked for promotion in the Church); and the privation stood him in good stead now. It only struck him as a little irregular to be sitting in the study with a person so ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... of time there spread a rumour That he did all this from a sense of humour. So instead of signalling and stoking, They gave themselves up to a course of joking. Whenever they knew that he was riding, They shunted his train on a lonely siding, Or stopped all night in the middle of a tunnel, On the plea that the boiler was a-coming ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... with this inexhaustible subject. You must forgive me if I do, for I am terribly anxious about my young Turks. If they are equal to such enormities in the green leaf, I am always asking myself, what will they do in the dry? I own that my sense of humour is tickled sometimes, but never enough to make me forget the sense of danger, present and to come, which all this keeps forever alive. Come and comfort me, and tell me how you have made your ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... detail.... Intelligent, generous, sweet-natured, broadminded, quick to see and to appreciate all that is beautiful either in nature or in art, rejoicing humbly over her own great gift, endowed with a keen sense of humour, Christine's is a thoroughly wholesome and lovable character. But charming as Christine's personality and her literary style both are, the main value of the book lies in its admirably lucid analysis of ...
— The Record of a Quaker Conscience, Cyrus Pringle's Diary - With an Introduction by Rufus M. Jones • Cyrus Pringle
... town house, at a reception one afternoon. She had a purple dress with lace, and a Queen Victoria sort of bonnet with strings, and little white feathers sticking up in the front; and she had a—" Pixie smiled into space with reminiscent enjoyment—"beautiful sense of humour!" ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... homogeneous docile herd. Towards that ideal he goes simply and directly, slaughtering and sparing, regardless entirely of any divergent variation that may arise beneath his control. A young calf with an incipient sense of humour, with a bright and inquiring disposition, with a gift for athleticism or a quaintly-marked hide, has no sort of chance with him at all on that account. He can throw these proffered gifts of nature aside without hesitation. Which is just what our theoretical ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... angry not with the Germans who are responsible for the war, but with his own government which is responsible for conscripting the boys. Ah, what a stupid subject of conversation! And how God would laugh, if he had any sense of humour! Suppose we go down to the beach and lie on the sand. I need rest: I ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... the darkness, as pale things waver down into deep water, and as soon as she disappeared my sense of humour returned. The episode appeared more clearly, as a flirtation with an enigmatic, but decidedly charming, chance travelling companion. The girl was a riddle, and a riddle once guessed is a very trivial thing. She, too, would be a very trivial thing when I had found ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... and temptations, and its indescribably petty miracles. Bazzi was well fitted for the execution of this task. He had a swift and facile brush, considerable versatility in the treatment of monotonous subjects, and a never-failing sense of humour. His white-cowled monks, some of them with the rosy freshness of boys, some with the handsome brown faces of middle life, others astute and crafty, others again wrinkled with old age, have clearly been copied from real models. He puts them into action without ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the Professor advised. "Don't let me lose confidence in you. Craig would not hurt a fly, and as to abducting your assistant—if my sense of humour were developed upon normal lines—well, I should laugh! What you have really done, you, and that young lady assistant of yours, is to terrify the poor fellow into such a state of nerves that he scarcely ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... little soft perhaps, and maybe a trifle self-consciously righteous. A good boy, a home boy. No need for me to pile on the adjectives—you know exactly the kind of chap he was. One more thing, however, and very important—he had a sense of humour and he was uniformly good tempered and willing. That is why, in a short time, the prejudice of the office gave way to open approval. "Young Baxter may be a 'pi' youth, but he's quick at his job, and nothing's too much ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... humour usually say, "A sense of humour helps under all circumstances"; and we managed to extract a great deal of fun out of the rigours of the American ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... reserved; but when he became interested in any matter he talked freely, although always deliberately, and he was always ready to deafen his opinions with much spirit. He had, moreover, a considerable sense of humour. What struck me most about Scott was the great acuteness of his powers of observing natural phenomena, and especially of such as had any bearing on variation, natural selection or hybridity. While most attentive ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... such it was. And as it progressed I was more and more struck by the change in the O'Keefe. All flippancy was gone, rarely did his sense of humour reveal itself in any of his answers. He was like a cautious swordsman, fencing, guarding, studying his opponent; or rather, like a chess-player who keeps sensing some far-reaching purpose in the game: alert, contained, watchful. Always he stressed ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... reflected Mrs. Fisher, making straight for the clump of daphne; the world had grown very dull, and had entirely lost its sense of humour. Probably they still had their jokes, these people—in fact she knew they did, for Punch still went on; but how differently it went on, and what jokes. Thackeray, in his inimitable way, would have ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... all that he is a sceptic, the Senestro is a brave man; and like many another unbeliever, he has a sense of humour. My coming had been promised by Avec; so he knew that somehow I was a part of the Prophecy—the prophecy which, for reasons of his own, he did not ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... laughable incident in a tragic business. How deeply thankful we ought to be that even the most serious matters have generally a silver lining about them in the shape of a joke, if only people could see it. The sense of humour is a very valuable possession in life, and ought to be cultivated in the Board schools — ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... Maurice. I did you an injustice. You have a certain sense of humour. It is not perhaps of the most refined kind, still you have, no doubt, provided a joke which will appeal to the officers' mess in Belfast, Dublin, and elsewhere; which will be told after dinner in most houses in the county for many a year to come. ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... a very ancient pedigree! By far the greater number of them, however, seem now pithless and pointless, whatever they may have been considered in ancient days, when, perhaps, folk found food for mirth in things which utterly fail to tickle our "sense of humour" in these double-distilled days. Of the [Greek: Asteia], or facetiae, of Hierokles, twenty-eight only are appended to his Commentary on Pythagoras and the fragments of his other works edited, with Latin translations, by Needham, and published at Cambridge in 1709. A much larger collection, ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... evaporated, and clutching her parcel she walked rapidly homeward. An occasional glance at her companion did not quite satisfy her that he was keeping his sense of humour under proper control. There was a twitching of his lips which might, she felt, in a little time become contagious. She ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... "swank"—whereas his family would surely have preferred their native Frankish. Worse still, Charles had an obsession, that of a Holy Roman Empire, with himself as head and the Pope as an "also ran," and this obsession led to endless trouble—trouble which is not over yet. Charles also had no sense of humour, or he would have made friends with the Slavs instead of fighting them. Men with a "mission in life" rarely have the "saving gift," and so they cause endless ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... deal with first principles under the simplest forms. They convey knowledge of the world, shrewd lessons of virtue and vice, of common sense and sense of humour, of the seemly and the absurd, of pleasure and pain, success and failure, in narratives where the plot moves briskly and dramatically from a beginning to an end. They treat, not of the corner of a nursery or a playground, but of the world at large, and life in perspective; of forces ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... the old school of Englishmen whom we can ill afford to lose. Capacious in mind and body, with a large sense of humour, of strict personal integrity, and a hearty enjoyment of life, it is indeed sad to think of him at the present moment as lying on a bed of languishing, from which it is doubtful whether he will rise more. Very ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... was not his only admirable characteristic. He had, also, a dependable sense of humour. It came to his relief now—he thought of his host, a chuckle throttling the beginnings of a second sigh ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... hesitated. He had no desire to be left alone with Mr. Burge again; and a sense of humour, which many years' association with the Primitive Apostles had not quite eradicated, strove ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs
... win his confidence. The poor gentleman might just as well have tried to understand the character of an asymptote, or to win the confidence of a Will-o'-the-wisp; and nothing but misery can come of it when a middle-aged city merchant, born without even a rudimentary sense of humour, suddenly determines to cultivate that gift for the benefit of a boy who can detect humour in the wording ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... I never read her, of course. Life is far too long and lovely for that sort of thing; but a bishop once told me that she was a great artist, and that if she had a sense of gravity, she would rival George Eliot. Dickens had probably no sense of humour. That is why he makes second-rate people die of laughing. Oscar Wilde was utterly mistaken when he wrote the 'Picture of Dorian Gray.' After Dorian's act of cruelty, the picture ought to have grown more sweet, more saintly, more ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... a keen sense of humour, and it was well worth hanging round that West Barricade, in order to see him catch an aristo in the very act of trying to flee from the vengeance ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... that Margaret was gentler and seemed more glad to see him than formerly. He wondered how that could be, seeing that he had made himself so very ridiculous; for he was not experienced enough to know that a woman's sense of humour is very different from that of a man she likes, when she herself has been concerned in the circumstances that have made him an object of ridicule to others. Then her face grows grave, her eyes harden, and her head goes up. 'I cannot ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... came on, Carraway measured him coolly, with an appreciation tempered by his native sense of humour. He perceived at once a certain coarseness of finish which, despite the deep-rooted veneration for an idle ancestry, is found most often in the descendants of a long line of generous livers. A moment later he weighed the keen gray flash of the eyes beneath ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... news of the first decision of the Government arrived at Delhi, when all at that place were full of the wrong done to the army, a private soldier of the 60th Rifles, inspired by the most exquisite sense of humour as well as of bitter satire, wrote upon the walls of the palace where his regiment was quartered the following appropriate sentence: "Delhi taken and India saved for 36 rupees 10 annas." It is said that the Governor-General demanded the name of this waggish soldier, ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... my hand. The name is an unfortunate one as far as music goes, and Goethe's putting it into his heroine's mouth just when she was most enraptured, seems to support the view I sometimes adopt in discoursing to the Man of Wrath that he had no sense of humour. But here I am talking about Goethe, our great genius and idol, in a way that no woman should. What do German women know of such things? Quite untrained and uneducated, how are we to judge rightly about anybody or anything? All we can do is to jump at conclusions, and, when we have jumped, ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... ferocious to herself when she remembered she had asked him, "Would it be a crime, Harry, to go back?" A crime! "Horrible traitor to myself that I was" (her thoughts would go) "to question it a crime just to take up my life again! A crime! Horrible fool that I was to be able, with no sense of humour, to give to so natural a desire an epithet so ludicrous as crime! A crime! A right, ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... Saintsbury, I imagine, would have stunned him with a huge mattock of adjectives. As it is, he seems to be in two minds whether to bury or to praise him. Luckily, he has tempered his moral sense with his sense of humour, and so comes to the happy conclusion that as a matter of fact, when we read or read about Pope, "some of the proofs which are most damning morally, positively ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... Bill had a strong sense of humour, albeit of a somewhat ghoulish brand, usually. As he rode back to report to Canby, the ludicrous side of the encounter grew on him until it outweighed the chagrin he first had felt at getting the worst ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... King, always dauntless in the absence of danger, replied that he would do this, trusting in God and Nelson. His Majesty, in tickling the Admiral's susceptible spot by associating his name with that of the Deity, doubtless made a good shot, and had Nelson's sense of humour been equal to his vanity, he might not have received the oily compliment with ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... contrasts. First it is the Wild Western humorist, primitive and untamed, running amuck through the petrified formulas and encrusted traditions of Europe. Then comes the fantastic juxtaposition of the shrewd Connecticut Yankee, with his comic irreverence and raucous sense of humour, his bourgeois limitations and provincial prejudices, to the Court of King Arthur, with its mediaevalism, its primitive rudeness and social narrowness. How many have delighted in the Yankee's inimitable description of his feelings toward that classic damsel of the sixth century? At first he got along ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... a joke, for the Zulus have a sense of humour, then repeated the message word for word, trying to pronounce Ishmael as Rachel did, saluted, mounted his horse, and galloped off after ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... thinking that Freda had the most charming, glad little laugh of any girl he knew. He suddenly remembered that he had never heard the Ideal laugh. She smiled placidly—he had raved to Freda about that smile—but she did not laugh. Roger began to wonder what an ideal without any sense of humour would be like ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... obvious that no cordiality of feeling or of action could exist between him and the plain, stubborn Hollanders. He had the fatal characteristic of loving only the persons who flattered him. With much perception of character, sense of humour, and appreciation of intellect, he recognized the power of the leading men in the nation, and sought to gain them. So long as he hoped success, he was loud in their praises. They were all wise, substantial, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... bejewelled lady Eileen passed her days either on the Hump, or in the Black Hole, or in the environs, and but for her sense of humour and her power of leading a second life above or below her first, her tenure of the post would have been short. The most delicate repetitions of mispronounced words, the subtlest substitution of society phrases for factory idioms, fell blunted against an impenetrable ignorance ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... way never to see two young people of opposite sex together without immediately thinking of the subject of marriage, and sooner or later betraying her thought. Heretofore he had been so accustomed to this cast of mind that, when it had tickled neither his sense of humour nor his vanity, he had been indifferent to it. To-night he knew it was vulgar; but he had no contempt for it, because it was his mother who was betraying vulgarity. He felt sorry that she should be like that—that all the men and women with whom she ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... had things all his own way. Between him, the romancer of the light heart and the free fancy, and his brother, the millionaire tradesman of the tough hide, there was the clash of temperaments but never the clash of intellects. ("Nobody with a sense of humour," says Uncle Ned, "ever made a million pounds.") That the man with the iron will should be beaten at the last with his own weapons, and brought to see the lifelong error of his ways by a violent philippic that must have surprised the speaker hardly less than his audience, was the most ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... at this, except the existing baby, and it was asleep on the waggonette cushions, under the white may-tree, and perhaps if it had been awake it wouldn't have laughed, for Oswald himself, though possessing a keen sense of humour, did not see anything to ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... whisked one roughly-booted foot out of its stirrup and laid it across his saddle-horn, while he regarded Bruce. "You cand git ter see Miss Sally ef you do that," he added, pursing up his lips, a subtle sense of humour on his face. "You cand see what Mizzourah girls ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... until we despaired of ever reaching anywhere. When at last our man did stop, we found Mrs. Gardner's cool, English-looking drawing-room a welcome refuge from the glare and the dust; and she was kindness itself. She made a delightful cicerone, for she has a keen sense of humour and a wide knowledge ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... Public possess that "taste for Art" and that "sense of humour" which some claim for and others deny to it, it (the B.P.) will throng the comfortable and well-lighted Gallery in New Bond Street, where hang some hundreds of specimens of the later work of the most unaffected humorist, and most masterly "Black-and-White" artist of his time. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... had several important compensations. The owner of the Dummer House decided that the boy was punished enough, and took no legal proceeding against him. On his part, Jim began to think much more seriously before giving reckless rein to his sense of humour. On the whole, his respect for the rights of others was decidedly increased. His self-esteem shrunk to more normal proportions and if he thought of the incident at all it was to wish very earnestly that some ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... unchangeable as the colour of grass and flowers, the songs of birds and the smell of the earth, yet with a difference. I recognized it chiefly in the parish priest I had been conversing with; for one thing, his mediaeval mind evidently did not regard a sense of humour and of the grotesque as out of place in or on a sacred building. If it had been lighter I should have looked at the roof for an effigy of a semi-human toad-like creature smiling down mockingly at the worshippers as they ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... vacant space, and explained to him that the native masons were instructed to build a wall round an old ruined church to protect it, and pulled down the church for the material to build the wall, he laughed heartily, and acknowledged the Irish had a sense of humour after all,—if not, a ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... good looks. Likewise a suitable wardrobe; not many clothes, but few, and those few, good. Clothes are supposed to please and satisfy women. You have musical talent, a love of books and flowers, a fine appreciation of beauty, a host of friends, and that one supreme gift of the gods—a sense of humour. In addition to all this, you have a comfortable home and an income of your own that enables you to do practically as you please. Could you ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... for rapidity of judgment is very just; however quaint the situation of Mr. Gladstone, as the reprover, may seem to people blessed with a sense of humour. But it is a quality, the defects of which have been painfully obvious to me all my life; and I try to keep my Pegasus—at best, a poor Shetland variety of that species of quadruped—at a respectable jog-trot, by loading ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Betsey smiled, touched with a grim sense of humour as she regarded the lads. Their "fixings" were certainly different. Everything, from the tips of Clifton's shining boots to the crown of his shining hat, declared him to be a dandy. His collar, necktie, coat, and all the rest, were in the latest fashion—a fashion a sight of which, but ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... to laugh, was a great wit, but his sense of humour was small, and the descent from these deities to Queen Anne savours not ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... letters appear in the papers about women. Profound questions are raised concerning them. Should they smoke? Should they work? Vote? Take Orders? Marry? Exist? Are not their skirts too short, or their sleeves? Have they a sense of humour, of honour, of direction? Are spinsters superfluous? But how seldom similar inquiries are propounded about men. How few persons discuss superfluous bachelors, or whether the male arm or leg is an immodest sight, or whether ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... public who ought to have the genius; they should have the lively appreciation, the keen sense of humour, the afflatus, and all that; and then those who cater for them would not need to trouble about those things—they would only have to cater, and leave the public to perceive, by means of their genius, the excellences of the fare provided. If a plain person does something, and geniuses perceive ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... relief, and, after disgusting even that saintly man, he in revenge carried round to certain barracks the signature of his would-be benefactor appended to a seditious appeal. Busybodies lacking all sense of humour therefore buzzed it about that the abolitionist leader sought to stir up a mutiny. On 13th May Pitt sent to him to sift any grains of truth that there might be in this peck of lies. The following unpublished letter from Wilberforce to Pitt shows that he advised him to use ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... of tragic temperament, if we may venture to peer through the printed page to the author, Marlowe lacked the sense of humour. This has been cast up against him as a serious weakness; but it is possible that just here lies the strength of his contribution to drama. His work in literature was to set a standard in the portrayal of deep emotions, and it may have been as well that ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... exultation in his traitorous flesh. To be sure, he had woven romances for himself, but his heroines were always of a type totally different to Lucy Woodrow. They were strong, dark-eyed, imperious creatures, who espoused all his beliefs and echoed his defiance of the world. What sense of humour had as yet found place in his nature was exercised to the full at the expense of the lackadaisical lover in life and in fiction, and now he felt there was something absurdly pensive in this phenomenon of his own. He satisfied himself that he was not in love with Lucy, but here were the marked characteristics ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... admirably with his natural bent. Self-reliant, agreeably egotistical, convinced of the excellence of his social and mental equipment, Tom was saved from excess of conceit by a lively desire to please, an even more lively sense of humour, and an intelligence to which at this period nothing came amiss in the way ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... work so hard as those hospital orderlies, and it is not surprising that our casualties in sick men were very heavy. Clerks in the office became ward masters at a moment's notice. But in spite of all this the spirit of the place remained unshaken. However great the heat, it did not destroy that sense of humour which is the glory of the British Army. Rather be beaten and retain that sense than be victorious and lose it. And if you come to think of it, no man who retains his sense of humour is ever ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... own fixed opinions on every subject, and nothing could move her out of her groove. She was a good woman and a kind-hearted one, but the sense of humour was lacking in her. She disliked all that she did not understand, and under the comprehensive term Bohemianism, she embodied all that was irregular ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... has a bright sense of humour much appreciated by his fellow-countrymen from Ireland. His latest notion is that journals "of a comic and serio-comic nature" should be deprived of their stocks of paper in order that catalogues and circulars ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 4, 1917 • Various
... is very serious about the hypocrisies of the virtuous and the injustice of our moral conventions. Other writers before him have been serious about these things, and I do not know that Mr. SHERREN has anything very new to say. I must also confess to thinking that a sense of humour would have assisted him greatly in his task. Nevertheless his readers are certain to sympathise with his beautiful heroine in her dismay at her unfortunate illegitimacy, and she is a good girl with a great regard for the feelings of all her friends, even though ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... denoted with a capital S, they invariably smoke, drink, gamble and swear. They neglect their homes and their children. They have little principle and less sense, no morals, no heart and absolutely no sense of humour! ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... aristocrat, was wrong, and the two village ladies, members of the middle class, were right, although they were without a sense of humour and did not know that their distinguished friend was poking a little fun at them when she spoke about ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... odds and ends. Henriques' own stuff is in a hole in the spruit. A handy way of getting one's luggage sent on, eh? The bags are waiting for me at a place I appointed.' And again Captain Arcoll indulged his sense of humour. Then he became grave, ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... valley!" he cried, interrupting her. "Do cultivate a sense of humour. Don't take things with such desperate seriousness! Come and try your instrument. It ought to be a good ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... wouldn't make me laugh. Why should I have a sense of humour? I sometimes think that all your friends imagine it's part of my duty to shriek with laughter at their wretched jokes. It wasn't in the contract. If I were pretty, my ambition would have been to be an adventuress; but an adventuress with no adventures ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... he was at the same time warm-hearted and generous to a fault, while a genuine sense of humour, which constantly shows itself in his letters, saved him many a time from those troubles into which the hasty often fall. "I wish," wrote George Borrow, within a short time of the publisher's death, "that all the world were ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... knapsacks and staves, but the lawyer utterly refused to surrender his bundle to the old lady's entreaties. The sometime schoolteachers were intelligent, very well read in Cowper, Pollock, and Sir Walter Scott, as well as in the Bible, and withal possessed of a fair sense of humour. The old lady and Coristine were a perpetual feast to one another. "Sure!" said he, "it's bagmen the ignorant creatures have taken us for more than once, and it's a genuine one I am now, Mrs. Hill," at which the good woman laughed, ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... with an amused smile, for it was impossible with her keen sense of humour not to see Sonora's attempts to make himself irresistible to her. Nor did she fail to observe that Trinidad, likewise, had spruced himself up a little more than usual, with the same purpose ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... German officer who was passing ordered his arrest as a spy. "All right," said Thompson, "I'm used to being arrested, but would you mind waiting just a minute until I get your picture?" The German, who had no sense of humour, promptly smashed the camera with his sword. Despite Thompson's protestations that he was an inoffensive American, the Germans destroyed all his films and ordered him to be out of the city before six that evening. He walked the thirty miles to Ghent and there caught a train for Ostend to ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... the moment, but it will remember all the same—all the more, perhaps, because it does not understand; and its curiosity will help it to solve the problem. Beth did humorous things at this time, but she had no sense of humour; she was merely experimenting. Her big eyes looked out of an impassive face solemnly; no one suspected the phenomenal receptivity which that stolid mask concealed, and, because the alphabet did not interest her, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... he was endowed with a strong sense of humour, and a gift of felicitous expression, which made him at once an admirable talker and an excellent letter-writer, and enabled him to hold his own among the noted wits and brilliant men of letters whom he gathered under his roof. A man of ideas more than a man of business, of enterprise rather than ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... nothing of wings and of alighting gear. And of all these breakages a note was made. Bills were handed to him—long and intricate bills, with each item amounting to so many hundreds of francs. Having a sense of humour, the pupil began to paper his shed with these formidable bills, allowing them to hang in festoons around the walls. What it cost him to learn to fly nobody except himself knew. He paid away certainly, in his bills for breakages, enough money to buy ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... you a year's salary, or two years' if that will content you. I have no wish to deal harshly with you, but I desire you to leave at once," said the Princess, who had little sense of humour, and thus thought the girl was in earnest when ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... and base just now, and you expect me to put up with it. You think me a low, selfish brute. I may be all that, and not want you to tell me so." Some of Percival's sense of humour—a little more grim than usual—was perceptible in the last ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... family of my Lord Falmouth, and claim descent from the most well bred of my race in this kingdom, the smooth fox terrier. All my ancestors were noted for their love of sport, their keen sense of humour, and hatred ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... books she loved, and possessing a mind that was untrammelled by society notions, it was refreshing to hear her talk. Far removed from the giddy society girl, she was yet full of mirth and pleasantness. Ready witted, she was quick at repartee; and possessing a keen sense of humour, she saw enjoyment in that which to many ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... on. "Why don't you speak and get it over? Are you waiting to clothe your phrases? Are you afraid of the naked words? I'm not. Let me hear them. Don't be more melodramatic than you can help because, as you know, I am cursed with a sense of humour, but ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lighthearted circle of his fellow-workers and club companions, yet he himself was scarcely of their disposition. His attitude towards life was still serious, he carried always with him some suggestions of a past which must ever remain an ugly and fearsome thing. His sense of humour was unlimited—in repartee he easily held his own. He was agreeable to everybody, but he never sought acquaintances, and avoided intimacies. More especially was he averse to any mention of ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... fluttered like blind bats in the crude of their adolescent years. Lynda, Betty, Truedale, and Brace read bloodcurdling horrors to her and took her to plays—the best. And they wedged in a deal of wholesome, commonplace fun that presently awoke a response and developed a sense of humour that gave them all a belief that ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... and to keep your high-bred eyes within their sockets lest you should lose them"; at which words those who were listening broke into a fit of laughter, for one redeeming characteristic among the Abati was that they had a sense of humour. ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... on geographic lines.[491] All this made little impression upon the host of Northern men who exulted in the union of all the anti-slavery elements. But their intense devotion to the positive utterances of their platform took away the sense of humour which often relieves the tension of political activity, and substituted an element of profound seriousness that was plainly visible in speakers and audiences. Seward did not hasten into the campaign. Richard H. Dana wrote, confidentially, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... attitude of Mr Garraway conveyed a hint of warning, had Mr Pinsent been able to seize it. The inhabitants of Troy have, in fact, a sense of humour, but it does not include facetiousness. On the contrary, facetiousness affronts and pains them. They do not understand it, and Mr Pinsent understood nothing else. Could he have been told that for close upon twenty years he ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... had a chum. When the times were tight We starved in Australian scrubs; We froze together in parks at night, And laughed together in pubs. And I often hear a laugh like his From a sense of humour keen, And catch a glimpse in a passing phiz Of his broad, ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... was stroking the turf. It sounds absolutely incredible, but for a moment Charles thought that she was in love with him, and had come out to tempt him. Charles believed in temptresses, who are indeed the strong man's necessary complement, and having no sense of humour, he could not purge himself of the thought by a smile. Margaret, who was engaged to his father, and his sister's wedding-guest, kept on her way without noticing him, and he admitted that he had wronged her on this point. But what was she doing? Why was she stumbling about amongst the rubble and ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... heart go on speaking of William Cowper to the end of the chapter. At any rate Shakspere and Cowper, divergent as were their lives and their work—and one readily recognizes the incomparably greater position of the former—had alike a keen sense of humour, rare among poets it would seem, and hugely would they both have enjoyed such a controversy ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... always seemed as if the one chink through which Scrooge's sympathies are got at and his heart-strings are eventually touched, is discernable in his keen sense of humour from the very outset. It is precisely through this that there seems hope, from the very beginning, of his proving to be made of "penetrable stuff." When, after his monstrous "Out upon merry Christmas!" he goes on to say, "If I had my will every idiot who goes about with 'merry Christmas' ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... Maule, Eden Menemon (it will be observed that he has a persistent, balefully procacious, perhaps, indeed, Freudian predilection for the letters U, V, and X),[3] are fantastic and fabulous ... sometimes almost frivolous. And here we may find our paradox. His sense of humour is abnormal, sometimes expressed directly by way of epigram or sly wording but may it not also occasionally express itself indirectly in these purple towers of painted velvet words, extravagant fables, and unbelievable ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... both engaged on journalistic work, reporting, you know, on different papers—and we came across each other once or twice in that way. He was a saturnine, queer-tempered fellow, taciturn at times, and at other times possessed by a wry sense of humour which made him excellent company, though it kept one in a state of alert disquiet. He would say things with that particular twist to them which made one look up, startled, wondering whether his remark was really intended ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... she knew that he was not really what he made people think he was. She had a ready sense of humour, and she felt that under his ponderous disguise of importance he was quite a ridiculous person. He was miserly to meanness; he was as vain as an ape; he was a man who had flattered himself, and had been flattered by others, into a sort of artificially inflated doll that ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... her father hastens the eviction of Louise by throwing a chair at her, very well aimed by Mr. ROBERT RADFORD, who only just missed his mark. I suppose it is hopeless to expect that the makers of "Grand" Opera (whose sense of humour is seldom their strong point) will consent to allow the trivialities of ordinary speech in everyday life ("How do you do?" "Thank you, I am not feeling my best," and so on) to be said—if they must find expression of some ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... the extraordinary narrative which has been called the Joyce-Armstrong Fragment is an elaborate practical joke evolved by some unknown person, cursed by a perverted and sinister sense of humour, has now been abandoned by all who have examined the matter. The most macabre and imaginative of plotters would hesitate before linking his morbid fancies with the unquestioned and tragic facts ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... side, listened with some amusement. His rather thin sense of humour was roused by the fact that the people around him were talking in so absurd a manner. This delay was not pleasant; it might even mean that he would be a few hours late at the Treasury, a thing he had never once ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... deck was in charge of Mr Adams, the second mate—a plain, steady-going, matter-of-fact sort of man, with none of that buoyant spirit and keen sense of humour which characterised hid senior shipmate McCarthy, although he was a thorough sailor to the backbone, and believed the human race to be divided into two classes, those who were seamen and those who weren't. The wind now took a more favourable turn, settling itself in the south-east quarter ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... many of the faults of this life come from the lack of a sense of humour. Certainly, if sulky boys had more of it, they would be inclined to follow the example ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... put this rogue to shame, and him with all his high talk about killing people who have never done a thing in life to him but kick him some number of feet out into the inn yard, and this need never to have happened if he had known enough to have kept his sense of humour to himself, which often happens in ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... strange and weird which the American had made so entirely his own. Have you read Maupassant's story called "Le Horla"? That is as good a bit of diablerie as you could wish for. And the Frenchman has, of course, far the broader range. He has a keen sense of humour, breaking out beyond all decorum in some of his stories, but giving a pleasant sub-flavour to all of them. And yet, when all is said, who can doubt that the austere and dreadful American is far the greater and more original mind of ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... under delusions about its own character and qualities in several notable particulars. It exaggerates its own energy and spirit of enterprise, its sense of humour and its chivalrousness towards women. That it should be aware that it possesses each of these qualities in a considerable degree would do no harm, for self-esteem is good for a nation; but it believes ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... Benita, who, in spite of the solemnity of the surroundings, could not control her sense of humour, "if you are not careful the ghosts of all these people ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... apparatus of alarm-bells and patrolled night and day by a horde of doganieri armed to the teeth—lest some peasant should throw a bundle of onions into the sacred precincts of the town without paying the duty of half a farthing? No nation with any sense of humour would endure this sort of thing. Every one resents the airs of this army of official loafers who infest the land, and would be far better employed themselves in planting onions upon the many miles of Italy which now lie fallow; the results of the system have ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Hawthorne was able to tread in that magic circle only by an exquisite refinement of taste, and by a delicate sense of humour, which is the best preservative against all extravagance. Both qualities combine in that tender delineation of character which is, after all, one of his greatest charms. His Puritan blood shows itself in sympathy, not with the stern side of the ancestral ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Joan answered. The whole occurrence was too ridiculous, yet for once in her life her sense of humour was failing her. "And I wish you would not bother to come any ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... Spedding had no sort of Ambition, and liked to be kept at one long work which he knew would not glorify himself. He was the wisest man I have known: not the less so for plenty of the Boy in him; a great sense of Humour, a Socrates in Life and in Death, which he faced with all Serenity so long as Consciousness lasted. I suppose something of him will reach America, I mean, of his Death, run over by a Cab and dying in St. George's Hospital ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... She was expansive, affectionate and constant; and she really cared far more about Percy now than she did when she married him. And this, though she was quite aware that he was entirely wanting in several things that she had particularly valued in Nigel (a sense of humour for one), and that he had inherited rather acutely the depressing Kellynch characteristic ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... half-hour. Only, last time you had seen one called 'Runnymead,' and another called 'The Limes.' Presently, if you like, we will walk along and read all the names. It is just the kind of thing which would appeal to our joint sense of humour. But first you must answer a few more ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... book is readable, it is therefore slight, either in material or construction. Much reading and research have provided the material, while real thought and argument have superintended the construction. Nor is it by any means without the adornment that a poetic temperament and a keen sense of humour can supply. ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... do so, and if one hundred of my subjects cannot carry your box I tell fifteen thousand of my subjects to do so." When I tried to picture fifteen thousand Fijians carrying my wretched box, it was altogether too much for my sense of humour, and I burst forth into a hearty roar of laughter, which so incensed the Prince that he shut himself up in his own room during the few ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... us are—balanced; in spite of occasional reveries we do come to terms with the limitations of life, with those desires and dreams and discretions that, to say the least of it, qualify our nobility, we take refuge in our sense of humour and congratulate ourselves on a certain amiable freedom from priggishness or presumption, but for Benham that easy declension to a humorous acceptance of life as it is did not occur. He found his limitations soon enough; he was perpetually rediscovering them, but out of these interments of the ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... no sense of humour in any but rational beings; and though dogs look ashamed and horses betray curiosity, that is only inasmuch as in these higher animals there is something analogous to what is reason in man. Moreover passions are conversant ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... and darkness and doubt are lifted, the soldier is frank and honest, he is not hide-bound by petty superstitions, he is willing fairly to consider and weigh all sensations, visions and inner illuminations. He is not blinded with the dogma of either agnosticism or sectarianism, while his sense of humour saves him from many of the errors of the various "Christian" brotherhoods. Curious enough, the people who object to duty, who are unwilling to strike a blow for righteousness, invariably belong to some of the freak sects and ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... a matter of Edward's relations with the girl I dare say Florence would have faced it out. She would no doubt have made him scenes, have threatened him, have appealed to his sense of humour, to his promises. But Mr Bagshawe and the fact that the date was the 4th of August must have been too much for her superstitious mind. You see, she had two things that she wanted. She wanted to be a great lady, installed in Branshaw Teleragh. She ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford |
