Each part of the mind sees only a little of what happens in some others, and that little is swiftly refined, reformulated and "represented." We like to believe that these fragments have meanings in themselves — apart from the great webs of structure from which they emerge — and indeed this illusion is valuable to us qua thinkers — but not to us as psychologists — because it leads us to think that expressible knowledge is the first thing to study.

For the advice in a joke is sometimes more useful than the most serious teaching.

The words, the style always reflects a habit of mind. And the habit of mind comes in from a different angle. The habit of mind uses the colloquial here and uses the joke there. And then creates some discordant music and then something strange and wonderful happens. And you see things differently. You see a different light is shed on it.

Your wit makes others witty.

It is having in some measure a sort of wit to know how to use the wit of others.

The message you give to people is better accepted with humor.

We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.

It is my own experience ... that commentators are far more ingenious at finding meaning than authors are at inserting it.

I find that I can say so much more through humor. People are far more likely to absorb a message or opinion if it is wrapped in wit.

Every habit makes our hand more witty, and out wit more handy.

Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.