Humorous Quotes To Let Go of Stress Lighten Your Day

Lawrence “Yogi” Berra is a former Major League Baseball player and manager, whose fractured use of the English language gave rise to the term, ‘yogism’. He quit school in the eighth grade, and has simultaneously denied and confirmed his reputation for malapropisms by stating, “I never said half the things I really said.”

Yogi Berra played almost his entire career for the New York Yankees and was elected to the baseball Hall of Fame in 1972. He picked up his more famous nickname from a relative who said he resembled a yoga practitoner holy man from India – a yogi - when Berra sat waiting to bat, with his arms and legs crossed or at times after a losing game when he wore a sad meditative expression. Years later, the Hanna-Barbera cartoon character ‘Yogi Bear’ was named after Berra, something Berra did not appreciate after he started being periodically addressed as “Yogi Bear.”

Not only is Berra widely regarded as one of the greatest catchers in baseball history, he is also a recipient of the Boy Scouts of America’s highest adult award, ‘the Silver Buffalo Award’.

“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.”

“The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase.”

“You should always go to other people’s funerals; otherwise, they won’t come to yours.”

(Yogi's response when asked what time it was by Rube Walker, the Met's pitching coach, while flying from New York to Los Angeles.) “Do you mean now?”

(Yogi’s standard reply to people who said he was bad looking.)
“You don't hit with your face.”

“You better cut the pizza in four pieces. I’m not hungry enough to eat eight.”

“Steve McQueen looks good in this movie. He must have made it before he died.”

(Yogi’s comment when introduced to the writer Ernest Hemingway.)
“Yeah, what paper do you write for, Ernie?”

(Yogi’s comment when asked what he liked best about school.) “Closed.”

Scott Adams, the cartoonist whose social commentary largely focuses on the world of corporate management, is best known as the creator of the comic strip “Dilbert.” Adams is no stranger to the business world. He earned a four-year degree in economics from Hartwick College and an MBA business management degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to launching his fulltime work as a cartoonist and writer, Adams put in 16 years in corporate America in the banking and telecommunications industries. He is a practicing vegetarian and owner of his own vegetarian food company.

“Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.”

“And bring me a hard copy of the Internet so I can do some serious surfing.”

“In Japan, employees occasionally work themselves to death. It’s called Karoshi. I don’t want that to happen to anybody in my department. The trick is to take a break as soon as you see a bright light and hear dead relatives beckon.”

Both Bonnett and I first listened to Garrison Kiellor’s morning radio while getting ready for our day of high school in Little Falls, Minnesota. It was aired starting in 1969 on Minnesota Public Radio and broadcast from St. Johns University in Collegeville, MN. In 1974 Kiellor started his live radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, which expanded his use of live music in the radio studio to a larger scale production. Like his initial morning radio show, the Saturday evening broadcasts feature an eclectic blend of music and humor.

As a writer, he has had many articles, columns and short stories published by magazines including the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, various newspapers and the e-zine, Salon.com. He also has a number of novels and short story collections in print. Keillor’s writing work now spans the mediums of print, audio and video - with his specials on DVD’s and the Robert Altman movie about A Prairie Home Companion, featuring the actors Kevin Klein, Lilly Tomlin, Meryl Streep, Woody Harrrelson, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, Tommy Lee Jones, Mia Rudolph and John C. Reilly (Garrison played the part of GK) – but also spans a variety of business venues which now include the opening of his bookstore in the basement level of a downtown St. Paul, MN restaurant in 2006. We hope to visit it soon to see if “Common Good Books, G. Keillor, Prop.” lives up to the store’s promising name. While we bet it probably will, we wouldn’t want to say for sure until we’ve seen the store for ourselves. When we do, we’ll keep all of you posted.

“A good newspaper is never nearly good enough but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever.

“A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.”

“Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.”

“A girl in a bikini is like having a loaded pistol on your coffee table - There's nothing wrong with them, but it's hard to stop thinking about it.”

“God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote novels, short stories and essays. On a personal note, Bonnett and I have read most all his works and found them to be bitingly funny and poignant commentaries on hypocrisy in a multitude of political, social and personal of guises.

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”

“Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”