My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right…

Whence proceeds this weight we lay On what detracting people say? Their utmost malice cannot make Your head, or tooth, or finger ache; Nor…

— Jonathan Swift

Our design, not respecting arts, but philosophy, and our subject, not manual, but natural powers, we consider chiefly those things which relate to gravity,…

— Isaac Newton

Of all the preaching in the world, I hate that preaching which tends to make the hearers laugh, or to move their minds with…

— Richard Baxter

Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is…

— Margaret Atwood

Let him be great, and love shall follow him.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dickinson is my hero because she was a joker, because she would never explain, because as a poet she confronted pain, dread and death,…

— Helen Oyeyemi

If brevity is the soul of wit then brevity and levity are the whole of it.

— Michael R. Burch

“Religious people are not fun... So, Jesus shows up and kids run around Him, want to be with Him. You know why? He's fun...…

— Mark Driscoll

Ultimately, we as a band just write what we write. Some of it's very serious, and even in the serious songs, there's sometimes an…

— Ed Robertson

That which is usually called dotage is not the weak point of all old men, but only of such as are distinguished by their…

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

The old idea that the joke was not good enough for the company has been superseded by the new aristocratic idea that the company…

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.

— Anonymous

I follow a more easy, and, in my opinion, a wiser course, namely--to inveigh against the levity of the female sex, their fickleness, their…

— Miguel de Cervantes

“I never thought I would see you armed." I was trying for levity. It worked like a lead balloon.”

— Melissa Jensen

In my experience sometimes the darker the material that you're doing, the more necessary it is to have some sort of levity around. I've…

— Nick Stahl