Your hair may be brushed, but your mind’s untidy. You’ve had about seven hours of sleep since Friday. No wonder you feel that lost sensation. You’re sunk from a riot of relaxation.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Rest, Leisure
The only people who should really sin are the people who can sin and grin.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Sin
There are people who are very resourceful
At being remorseful,
And who apparently feel that the best way to make friends
Is to do something terrible and then make amends.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Forgiveness
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I’ll never see a tree at all.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Wilderness, Just for Fun
Some primal termite knocked on wood;
and tasted it, and found it good.
That is why your Cousin May
fell through the parlor floor today.
—Ogden Nash
Nothing there but basketball, a game which won’t be fit for people until they set the basket umbilicus-high and return the giraffes to the zoo.
—Ogden Nash
If you don’t want to work, you have to work to earn enough money so that you won’t have to work.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Work
They take the paper and they read the headlines. So they’ve heard of unemployment and they’ve heard of bread-lines. And they philanthropically cure them all by getting up a costume charity ball.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Charity
The cow is of the bovine ilk;
One end is moo, the other milk.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Animals, Just for Fun
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Life and Living, Life
Here lies my past, Goodbye I have kissed it; Thank you kids, I wouldn’t have missed it.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Reflection, Past
And one of his partners asked “Has he vertigo?” and the other glanced out and down and said “Oh no, only about ten feet more.”
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Suicide
Sleep is perverse as human nature, Sleep is perverse as a legislature, Sleep is as forward as hives or goiters, And where it is least desired, it loiters.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Sleep
Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Parents, Parenting
The most exciting happiness is the happiness generated by forces beyond your control.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Happiness
How confusing the beams from memory’s lamp are;
One day a bachelor, the next a grampa.
What is the secret of the trick?
How did I get so old so quick?
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Memory, Aging
A husband is a guy who tells you when you’ve got on too much lipstick and helps you with your girdle when your hips stick.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Marriage, Husbands
The only incurable troubles of the rich are the troubles that money can’t cure.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Opportunities, Reality
Some debts are fun when you are acquiring them, but none are fun when you set about retiring them.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Fun
To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Marriage, Right
He without benefit of scruples
His fun and money soon quadruples.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Morals
You can take it as understood That your luck changes only if it’s good.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Luck
Middle age is when you’ve met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Age, Aging
I’d rather be a great bad poet than a good bad poet.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Greatness
I think remorse ought to stop biting the consciences that feed it.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Conscience
My garden will never make me famous, I’m a horticultural ignoramus.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Gardening
I don’t mind their having a lot of money, and I don’t care how they employ it, but I do think that they damn well ought to admit they enjoy it.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Wealth, Riches
A little incompatibility is the spice of life, as long as he has income and she is pattable.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Marriage
Good wine needs no bush, and perhaps products that people really want need no hard-sell or soft-sell TV push. Why not? Look at pot.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Advertising
There is only one thing for a man to do who is married to a woman who enjoys spending money, and that is enjoy earning it.
—Ogden Nash
Topics: Marriage
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Russell Hoban American Author
- Dorothy L. Sayers English Novelist, Playwright
- Helen Gurley Brown American Publisher
- Mark Van Doren American Poet, Critic
- Wallace Stevens American Poet
- Will Rogers American Humorist, Actor
- Frank O’Hara American Poet, Art Critic
- Conrad Aiken American Poet, Novelist
- Stanley Kunitz American Poet
- Henry Adams American Historian
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