Jerry Della Femina Quotes

True wit, to every man, is that which falls on another.

Paintings and fightings are best seen at a distance.

The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh at it.

Up there with my awards, I have a great big statue of Groucho Marx, just to put everything in perspective.

Always live in the ugliest house on the street - then you don't have to look at it.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

It is a good thing that life is not as serious as it seems to a waiter.

I spent many years laughing at Harry Secombe's singing until somebody told me that it wasn't a joke.

Life is funny and it is interesting how we make it as serious as possible.

Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.

If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.

You could say that when you introduce humour to your work, you also step back a little from it. You create a distance.

Sometimes laughing isn't the best judge of what's funny, 'cause I think there's a lot of things that are really funny that don't make you laugh, that don't make you physically, audibly make a noise, but is something that is much more powerful than that.

Beauty, my dear Sir, is not so much a quality of the object beheld, as an effect in him who beholds it. If our sight were longer or shorter, or if our constitution were different, what now appears beautiful to us would seem misshapen, and what we now think misshapen we should regard as beautiful. The most beautiful hand seen through the microscope will appear horrible. Some things are beautiful at a distance, but ugly near;

Comedy is the difference between how you see a person and how they see themselves.

I think my life has been transformed by the ability to take things that exist in the world and look at them more closely. I think that's what art does at its best: it allows us to slow down.

Beauty surrounds us.

Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do

I do not deny that what happened to us is a thing worth laughing at. But it is not worth telling, for not everyone is sufficiently intelligent to be able to see things from the right point of view.

The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance.

I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance.

The scenes of our life are like pictures done in rough mosaic. Looked at close, they produce no effect. There is nothing beautiful to be found in them, unless you stand some distance off.

To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful.

Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!

The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.