Sid Caesar Quotes

In between goals is a thing called life, that has to be lived and enjoyed.

The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot.  The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius.

Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.

What it boiled down to is the strength to be able to say, 'I don't want to think about it.' Thinking negatively is the result of guilt and insecurity... You are the person who makes yourself happy. You're the person who makes yourself sad. It's much easier to feel better when you keep remembering that." [-p.481, "Caesar's Hours, My Life in Comedy with Love and Laughter", by Sid Caesar with Eddy Friedfeld, 2003]

There's a now, a was, and a gonna be. Now is now, and after now is a was. And what comes after the was is a gonna be. It hasn't happened yet. It's gonna happen as soon as the now is over. But if you have a good now, you're bound to have a good was and a good gonna be. But after the bad now comes a bad was. But if you have a bad now and dwell on it, you're going to have a bad gonna be and you're going to have a bad cycle. If you learn from the bad was, you can turn the bad gonna be into a good gonna be. The only way you can change the cycle is after the was. If you carry the bad wases around with you, they get heavy and become should'a could'as - I should'a done this, I could'a done that. If you learn from the was, you'll have a great now; you won't repeat the same mistakes. It will bring you to a good now, which changes the cycle to a good was, and a good gonna be. You need to learn from the wases. It's all about changing your attitude.

There's humor in the little things that people did. If you showed them how they looked when they did what they did, people would laugh.

It is as if James Joyce, for his sins, had been forced to grow up in Queens; as if Sam Beckett had been mugged by Godot in a Flushing comfort station; as if Sid Caesar played the part of Moby Dick in a Roman Polanski movie shot underwater in Long Island City; as if Martin Heidegger has gone into vaudeville...Mr. Mano is Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson and Henderson the Rain King.

When I was communicating with the spirit world many years ago, time was explained to me as like a giant circle that loops back on itself. Perhaps it would help to explain the concept that past, present, and future are all happening simultaneously, and not on a linear path, and allows us to experience many lives at the same time. It also brings into play the concept of parallel dimensions. My brain finds this very hard to absorb, but Sid Caesar, a US actor, writer, and comedian, summed it up brilliantly:

The guy who invented the wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius.” —SID CAESAR

Ma, I'm gonna stay home and watch Sid Caesar. THE MOTHER You gonna die without a son. MARTY So I'll die without a son. THE MOTHER Put on your blue suit... MARTY Blue suit, gray suit, I'm still a fat little man. A fat little ugly man.

If you have no tragedy, you have no comedy. Crying and laughing are the same emotion. If you laugh too hard, you cry. And vice versa.

Caesar and The Honeymooners—two very different great comedians, Sid and Jackie Gleason.