Best 20 quotes of Irvin S. Cobb on MyQuotes

A funeral eulogy is a belated plea for the defense delivered after the evidence is all in.

An epitaph is a belated advertisement for a line of goods that have been permanently discontinued.

As I understand it, sport is hard work for which you do not get paid.

A woman may have a witty tongue or a stinging pen but she will never laugh at her own individual shortcomings.

Golf - a young man's vice and an old man's penance.

Humor is merely tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn.

If I wanted to go crazy I would do it in Washington because it would not be noticed

If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.

I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial.

Men are vain; but they won't mind women working so long as they get smaller wages for the same job.

Middle age: when you begin to exchange your emotions for symptoms.

Of all American cities of whatever size the most friendly on preliminary inspection, and on further acquaintance the most likable. The happiest-hearted, the gayest, the most care-free city on this continent.

Reelfoot is, and has always been, a lake of mystery.In places it is bottomless. Other places the skeletons of the cypress-trees that went down when the earth sank, still stand upright so that if the sun shines from the right quarter, and the water is less muddy than common, a man, peering face downward into its depths, sees, or thinks he sees, down below him the bare top-limbs upstretching like drowned men's fingers, all coated with the mud of years and bandaged with pennons of the green lake slime.

To be born in Kentucky is a heritage; to brag about it is a habit; to appreciate it is a virtue.

Until you go to Kentucky and with your own eyes behold the Derby, you ain't never been nowhere and you ain't seen nothin'!

You couldn't tell if she was dressed for an opera or an operation.

You had to hate the Colonel a whole lot to keep from loving him.

Daylight would have shown a wilderness weathered and blowzy, a wanton that had lived her summer too fast and too greedily. It would have shown the white birches pale and shivering in a sudden ague, and here and there an ash or a sumac burning red, like a hectic spot, where the first frosts already had set the marks of their galloping consumption on the cheek of the forest, giving warning of the time when the white plague of the winter would make a massacre of all this present glory and turn the trees to naked skeletons and stretch a bony bare cadaver on every steeper hillside to bleach there until the snows covered things up. But now the kindly nighttime had all signs and threats of approaching death, so that each shriveled speckled leaf, as revealed and traced in the waning light, seemed flawless — a perfect part of a perfect tapestry.

Good motives butter no parsnips, and hell is paved with buttered parsnips.

In the country, a good he-snowstorm makes a lovely design for putting on a holiday greetings card. In the city it just makes an infernal mess for the street-cleaning department to wrestle with. … By midday of next day it would be licked to a custard— molten into puddles of foggy slush where cellar furnaces exhaled their hot breath up out of sidewalk gratings, roiled and fouled and crunched down beneath the heels and the tires of the town, flung up in crumply billows by the conscripted shovel crews, and under the park trees and on the park meadows would show a stark and grayish cast like the face of a grimy pauper whose corpse the undertaker scanted. And the longer it stayed there the sootier and the dirtier and the deader-looking it would get to be. You may worry the city with your winter weathers; you cannot keep her licked for any great length of time.