Top 100 Robert Benchley Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “This is a test. It is only a test. Had it been an actual job, you would have received raises, promotions, and other signs of appreciation.”

— Robert Benchley

2. “The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.”

— Robert Benchley

3. “Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.”

— Robert Benchley

4. “It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”

— Robert Benchley

5. “There is no such place as Budapest. Perhaps you are thinking of Bucharest, and there is no such place as Bucharest, either.”

— Robert Benchley

6. “Every boy should have two things: a dog and a mother who lets him have one.”

— Robert Benchley

7. “Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.”

— Robert Benchley

8. “I have tried to know absolutely nothing about a great many things, and I have succeeded fairly well.”

— Robert Benchley

9. “The only cure for a real hangover is death.”

— Robert Benchley

10. “Charlemagne either died or was born or did something with the Holy Roman Empire in 800.”

— Robert Benchley

11. “A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down.”

— Robert Benchley

Featured in: Loyalty Quotes

12. “The wise man thinks once before he speaks twice.”

— Robert Benchley

13. “Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed be doing at that moment.”

— Robert Benchley

14. “In preparing the soil for planting, you will need several tools. Dynamite would be a beautiful thing to use, but it would have a tendency to get the dirt into the front-hall and track up the stairs.”

— Robert Benchley

15. “Streets full of water. Please Advise.”

— Robert Benchley

16. “Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.”

— Robert Benchley

17. “There are several ways to apportion the family income, all of them unsatisfactory.”

— Robert Benchley

18. “A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.”

— Robert Benchley

19. “Birds which are the same color as the foliage in which they nest are less likely to be disturbed by other birds who want to drop in and chat, and therefore last longer.”

— Robert Benchley

20. “Anyone will be glad to admit that he knows nothing about beagling, or the Chinese stock market, or ballistics, but there is not a man or woman alive who does not claim to know how to cure hiccoughs.”

— Robert Benchley

21. “After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get a new book out of him each year.”

— Robert Benchley

22. “Central Park is the grandiose symbol of the front yard each child in New York hasn’t got.”

— Robert Benchley

23. “In America there are two classes of travel – first class, and with children.”

— Robert Benchley

24. “Breaking the ice in the pitcher seems to be a feature of the early lives of all great men.”

— Robert Benchley

25. “She sleeps alone at last.”

— Robert Benchley

26. “There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes and those who do not.”

— Robert Benchley

27. “The pencil sharpener is about as far as I have ever got in operating a complicated piece of machinery with any success.”

— Robert Benchley

28. “It has always seemed to me that the most difficult part of building a bridge would be the start.”

— Robert Benchley

29. “Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with that it’s compounding a felony.”

— Robert Benchley

30. “My only solution for the problem of habitual accidents is to stay in bed all day. Even then, there is always the chance that you will fall out.”

— Robert Benchley

31. “In Milwaukee last month a man died laughing over one of his own jokes. That’s what makes it so tough for us outsiders. We have to fight home competition.”

— Robert Benchley

32. “I can’t bring myself to say, ‘Well, I guess I’ll be toddling along.’ It isn’t that I can’t toddle. It’s just that I can’t guess I’ll toddle.”

— Robert Benchley

33. “Anything can happen, but it usually doesn’t.”

— Robert Benchley

34. “If you think that you have caught a cold, call in a good doctor. Call in three good doctors and play bridge.”

— Robert Benchley

35. “I know I’m drinking myself to a slow death, but then I’m in no hurry.”

— Robert Benchley

36. “Why don’t you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?”

— Robert Benchley

37. “Dachshunds are ideal dogs for small children, as they are already stretched and pulled to such a length that the child cannot do much harm one way or the other.”

— Robert Benchley

38. “Other men wear white suits in summer and it doesn’t seem to bother them. But my white suit seems to be a little whiter than theirs. I think also that it may have something written on the back of it, although I can’t find it when I take the suit off.”

— Robert Benchley

39. “There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them.”

— Robert Benchley

40. “Who said time machines haven’t been built yet? They already exist. They’re called books.”

— Robert Benchley

41. “Traveling with children corresponds roughly to traveling third class in Bulgaria.”

— Robert Benchley

42. “Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author’s soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.”

— Robert Benchley

43. “There is probably no more obnoxious class of citizen, taken end for end, than the returning vacationist.”

— Robert Benchley

44. “All laughter is a muscular rigidity spasmodically relieved by involuntary twitching.”

— Robert Benchley

45. “A real hangover is nothing to try out family remedies on. The only cure for a real hangover is death.”

— Robert Benchley

46. “People who begin sentences with “I may be old-fashioned but – ” are usually not only old-fashioned but wrong. I never thought the time would come when I should catch myself leading off with that crack. But I feel it coming on right now.”

— Robert Benchley

47. “The Great Arizona Desert is full of the bleaching bones of people who waited for me to start something.”

— Robert Benchley

48. “If there is a streak of ham anywhere in an actor, Shakespeare will bring it out.”

— Robert Benchley

49. “Work is a form of nervousness.”

— Robert Benchley

50. “The art of cursing people seems to have lost its tang since the old days when a good malediction took four deep breaths to deliverand sent the outfielders scurrying toward the fence to field.”

— Robert Benchley