Wit Quotes by Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, Gordon Pask, Oscar Wilde, William Shakespeare, W. Somerset Maugham, Tupac Shakur and many others.
Wit is its own remedy. Liberty and commerce bring it to its true standard. The only danger is the laying an embargo. The same thing happens here as in the case of trade: impositions and restrictions reduce it to a low ebb; nothing is so advantageous to it as a free port.
I mean somebody with the wit and the guts to go and do and create. And, that I believe is what education is all about
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
Make the doors upon a woman’s wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that, and ’twill out at the key-hole; stop that, ’twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney.
Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom.
Picture perfect, I paint a perfect picture bomb the hoochies wit’ precision, my intentions to get richer.
The slow rhythm of the body, the insistent rhythm of the wit, were they becoming irreconcilable in modern civilisation? The sedentary life, frustration and irritability; work with the body, fatigue – and peace of mind.
Gossip isn’t scandal and it’s not merely malicious. It’s chatter about the human race by lovers of the same. Gossip is the tool of the poet, the shop-talk of the scientist, and the consolation of the housewife, wit, tycoon and intellectual. It begins in the nursery and ends when speech is past.
A net set up to catch fish may snare a duck; a mantis hunting an insect may itself be set upon by a sparrow. Machinations are hidden within machinations; changes arise beyond changes. So how can wit and cleverness be relied upon?
It doesn’t phaze, I amaze wit my phrases
Play this in your Jeep, so your neighbors lose some sleep
(I wanna thank you)
Play this in your Jeep, so your neighbors lose some sleep
(I wanna thank you)
Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.
Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from – dare I say it – God.
Wit invents; inspiration reveals. The inventions of wit are conceits – metaphors and paradoxes – that discover the secret correspondences that unite beings and things among and with themselves; inspiration is condemned to dissipate its revelations – unless a form can be found to contain them.
Society develops wit, but its contemplation alone forms genius.
A poem’s life and death dependeth still
Not on the poet’s wits, but reader’s will.
Not on the poet’s wits, but reader’s will.
The man who backbites an absent friend, nay, who does not stand up for him when another blames him, the man who angles for bursts of laughter and for the repute of a wit, who can invent what he never saw, who cannot keep a secret — that man is black at heart: mark and avoid him.
I hope wit comes through in all the characters I portray.
When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical.
Hubert Humphrey with kids”Be clear where America stands. Human brotherhood and equal opportunity for every man, woman, and child, we are committed to it, in America and around the world.”
The Penny Post will do more for the circulation of ideas, for the fostering of domestic affections, for the humanizing of the mass generally, than any other single measure that our national wit can devise.
Alternative medicine people call themselves “holistic” and say it’s the “whole” approach. Well, if it’s the whole approach, let it be the mind as well. Use logic, use sense, use the incredible five wits you were given by creation.
In the midst of the fountain of wit there arises something bitter, which stings in the very flowers.
Where judgment has wit to express it, there’s the best orator.
Wit is a weapon. Jokes are a masculine way of inflicting superiority. But humor is the pursuit of a gentle grin, usually in solitude.
Wit, like hunger, will be with great difficulty restrained from falling on vice and ignorance, where there is great plenty and variety of food.
We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, so we buy ice cream.
A handbag is only one item to be worn with a complete outfit. Add a peony pink leather handbag to a charcoal gray suit, for instance, and the impact is chic with a touch of wit.
Every habit makes our hand more witty and our wit less handy.
I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.
The great secret of succeeding in conversation is to admire little, to hear much; always to distrust our own reason, and sometimes that of our friends; never to pretend to wit, but to make that of others appear as much as possibly we can; to hearken to what is said and to answer to the purpose.
Wit and woman are two frail things, and both the frailer by concurring.
What an ornament and safeguard is humor! Far better than wit for a poet and writer. It is a genius itself, and so defends from the insanities.
There’s a very fine line between underacting and not acting at all. And not acting is what a lot of actors are guilty of. It amazes me how some of these little numbers with dreamy looks and a dead pan are getting away wit it. I’d hate to see them on stage with a dog act.
Wit has as few true judges as painting.
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
Wit is the refractory pupil of judgment.
Every thing in this world, said my father, is big with jest,–and has wit in it, and instruction too,–if we can but find it out.
Wit – the salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.
There is hardly that person to be found who is not more concerned for the reputation of wit and sense, than honesty and virtue.
Converse with men makes sharp the glittering wit, but God to man doth speak in solitude.
Herein find fiction full of whimsy, wit, hurt, and terror. Wicked, as in wickedly funny, is in the mix, too, along with a prose style both seductive and sly. Any one of Doug Watson’s first collection of stories, The Era of Not Quite, can mend a broken world.
nothing is so pleasant … as to display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a trifle tedious to hear another person display theirs.
So is there any part of you that’s not a lethal weapon? (Kiara) No. Even my wits are sharpened. (Nykyrian)
Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit;
All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit.
All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit.
If you come to a fork in the road, take it.
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.
England gave me a chance. It’s a very individual country where people have a personal style; they don’t all follow a trend. The subtlety and wit of England is incredible, and they are very creative.
Competition is what keeps me playing the psychological warfare of matching skill against skill and wit against wit.
Seduction is about intelligence and wit. Someone who makes me laugh has every chance to seduce me.
We are deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Jonathan Hardy. The clever wit and joy he brought to his performance of Rygel was a true gift to the world of Farscape. My sincerest condolences go out to Jonathan’s family and to his many fans around the world.
Why should I seek for love or study it?
It is of God and passes human wit;
I study hatred with great diligence,
For that’s a passion in my own control,
A sort of besom that can clear the soul
Of everything that is not mind or sense.
It is of God and passes human wit;
I study hatred with great diligence,
For that’s a passion in my own control,
A sort of besom that can clear the soul
Of everything that is not mind or sense.
There’s something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it’s a grandiose form of funk.
Things are bound to begin happening if you’ve got your wits about you. You create the lucky accidents.
Beauties are always curious about beauties, and wits about wits.
Life is not easy. We all have problems-even tragedies-to deal with, and luck has nothing to do with it. Bad luck is only the superstitious excuse for those who don’t have the wit to deal with the problems of life.
Ryan Alvanos is an offbeat, insanely inventive singer-songwriter who sneaks up on you with a sly wit and subtle power.
There are as many and innumerable degrees of wit, as there are cubits between this and heaven.
You cannot tell a poor boy from a small country town on the plains of South Dakota who has had the opportunity to be a teacher, a mayor, a senator, and a vice president, that America is not a nation of promise.
These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody’s little display of genius.
I have dashed across continents and oceans as a fugitive and have matched my wits with the police and secret agents seeking to deprive me of one of the greatest blessings man can have-liberty.
And wit’s the noblest frailty of the mind.
I have ever thought so superstitiously of wit, that I fear I have committed idolatry against wisdom.
Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival.
From Lucifer to Jerry Sneak there is not an aspect of evil, imperfection, and littleness which can elude the lights of humor or the lightning of wit.
He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious.
Sarcasm is not the rapier of wit its wielders seem to believe it to be, but merely a club: it may, by dint of brute force, occasionally raise bruises, but it never cuts or pierces.
Diana Vreeland was “the Empress,” the avatar of the age. An old name or old money were not enough to get you into Studio 54 – or Interview magazine, for that matter. You had to have a lot of something else, like looks or brains or wit or fabulous clothes.
You may well ask how I expect to assert my privacy by resorting to the outrageous publicity of being one’s actual self on paper. There’s a possibility of it working if one chooses the terms, to wit: outshouting image-gimmick America through a quietly desperate search for self.
Loud laughter is the mirth of the mob, who are only pleased with silly things; for true Wit or good Sense never excited a laugh since the creation of the world. A man of parts and fashion is therefore often seen to smile, but never heard to laugh.
Some books we read, tho’ few there are that hit the happy point where wisdom joins with wit.
Those orators who give us much noise and many words, but little argument and less wit, and who are the loudest when least lucid, should take a lesson from the great volume of nature; she often gives us the lightning without the thunder, but never the thunder without the lightning.
Wit is as infinite as love, and a deal more lasting in its qualities.
Display advertising and the movies, though they may dull the wits, certainly stimulate the eyes.
The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.
A good wit will make use of anything.
Humor is wit and love.
They make their fortune who are stout and wise,
Wit rules the heavens, discretion guides the skies.
[Lat., Che sovente addivien che’l saggio e’l forte.
Fabro a se stesso e di beata sorte.]
Wit rules the heavens, discretion guides the skies.
[Lat., Che sovente addivien che’l saggio e’l forte.
Fabro a se stesso e di beata sorte.]
Some wits, too, like oracles, deal in ambiguities, but not with equal success; for though ambiguities are the first excellence of an imposter, they are the last of a wit.
How many great ones may remember’d be,
Which in their days most famously did flourish,
Of whom no word we hear, nor sign now see,
But as things wip’d out with a sponge do perish,
Because the living cared not to cherish
No gentle wits, through pride or covetize,
Which might their names forever memorize!
Which in their days most famously did flourish,
Of whom no word we hear, nor sign now see,
But as things wip’d out with a sponge do perish,
Because the living cared not to cherish
No gentle wits, through pride or covetize,
Which might their names forever memorize!
Humor is the offspring of man; it comes forth like Minerva, fully armed from the brain.
If you were a kid in the 1950s, and you got nightmares from a story in a horror comic book, you have Al Feldstein to blame. If you were a kid in the ’60s or ’70s, giggling at ‘MAD’s prankster wit, you have Feldstein to thank.
I am always fully in tune with the interviewer, who is usually trying to make me look silly. My objective is quite the opposite during an interview: I never use my wit or my intellect to make the interviewer look silly.
But methings wit is more necessary than beauty; and I think no young woman ugly that has it, and no handsome woman agreeable without it
Where the drink goes in, there the wit goes out.
Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, and all flock to their aid.
O love, what strange and wonderful fits: one sole thing, one beauty alone, can give me life and deprive me of wits.
I was in them million dollar meetings, he was cheatin. All up in the church, he was sneakin wit the deacon.
I write. I have read a great deal. I enjoy books. I like the wit of languages. Even French I like. I like to be able to think in different modes. I like to be able to use the language a great deal and carry on rehearsals in French.
Wit is often a mask. If you tear it you will find either genius irritated or cleverness juggling.
The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none.
When one wishes to play the wit, he sometimes wander a little from the truth.
Depending upon shock tactics is easy, whereas writing a good play is difficult. Pubic hair is no substitute for wit.
Never engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed man.
Yet writers say, as in the sweetest bud
The eating canter dwells, so eating love
Inhabits in the finest wits of all.
The eating canter dwells, so eating love
Inhabits in the finest wits of all.
Wit must be foiled by wit: cut a diamond with a diamond.
Wit is the lowest form of humor.
I am grateful to Stacy Schiff first of all because she can write a sentence-because she offers us her scholarship with wit, clarity, and grace. Once again, she has done what only the best writers can do: she has made the world new, again.
I am a passionate devotee of the Howard Hawks’ screwball comedies of the 1930s and the 1940s, where I think that the relations between men and women were at their civilized height in terms of banter and exchange of wit and equality.
[When criticized for appearing bare-shouldered Madonna-like at a banquet:] A comparison between Madonna and me is a comparison between a strapless evening gown and a gownless evening strap.
I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance Huxley
People are always saying, ‘You use irony,’ and it’s like, actually, we don’t use irony: we use wit and playfulness and irreverence.
Cunning is only the mimic of discretion, and may pass upon weak men in the same manner as vivacity is often mistaken for wit, and gravity for wisdom.
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.
I am not here to judge whether people are locked in poverty because of themselves or because of the society in which they live. All I know is that they are there and we are trying to do something about it.
A perfect judge will read each word of wit with the same spirit that its author writ.
I like pushing the envelope. I like pushing myself and the audience, whether it’s a TV show or live. I like to throw people over the edge of the cliff and scare the wits out of them, but then pull them back and make them safe.
Equality means equality for all – no exceptions, no ‘yes, buts’, no asterisked footnotes imposing limits.
I was a big fan of how Johnny Carson hosted awards shows. Dick Cavett, as well, I think did a really great job of providing a nice blend of comedy, wit and class.
I have never injured anybody with a mordant poem; my
verse contains charges against nobody. Ingenuous, I have
shunned wit steeped in venom–not a letter of mine is dipped
in poisonous jest.
verse contains charges against nobody. Ingenuous, I have
shunned wit steeped in venom–not a letter of mine is dipped
in poisonous jest.
If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
Wit and wisdom are born with a man.
There is one single fact that one may oppose to all the wit and argument of infidelity; namely, that no man ever repented of being a Christian on his death-bed.
The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
One should never risk a joke, even of the mildest and most unexceptional charters, except among people of culture and wit.
I’m keeping my acerbic wit completely fueled.
For poetry, he’s past his prime,
He takes an hour to find a rhyme;
His fire is out, his wit decayed,
His fancy sunk, his muse a jade.
I’d have him throw away his pen,
But there’s no talking to some men.
He takes an hour to find a rhyme;
His fire is out, his wit decayed,
His fancy sunk, his muse a jade.
I’d have him throw away his pen,
But there’s no talking to some men.
Fat paunches have lean pates, and dainty bits Make rich the ribs, but backrout quite the wits.
Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions.
Government mandates, incidentally, are likely to distort rather than solve the problem of finding a market. I would, therefore, force my organization to live by its wits rather than to rely on capricious subsidies or non-economic-based regulation to fuel my business.
It is all too easy for a society to measure itself against some abstract philosophical principle or political slogan. But in the end, there must remain the question: What kind of life is one society providing to the people that live in it?
I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.
Wine …moderately drunken it doth quicken a man’s wits, It doth comfort the heart.
Envy’s a sharper spur than pay: No author ever spar’d a brother; Wits are gamecocks to one another.
It takes a hell of a lot for a man to put up with me. I can be a handful.
In matching your wits against yourself you take on the shrewdest and wiliest antagonist you can have, and consequently a victorious outcome in this duel of wits brings a great feeling of triumph.
Neatness of phrase is so closely akin to wit that it is often accepted as its substitute.
I think we are moving to that place where we are being celebrated for our character, our inside, our wit. I think that’s the direction we should go because that’s what defines you as a person, not a number on a scale.
Come, come, leave business to idlers, and wisdom to fools: they have need of ’em: wit be my faculty, and pleasure my occupation, and let father Time shake his glass.
It is with wits as with razors, which are never so apt to cut those they are employed on as when they have lost their edge.
What do we want for people? Human dignity, personal expression and fulfillment, justice, freedom.
I love hotels. I generally prefer smaller boutique hotels to large chains, especially when attention and wit has been given to interesting design elements and beautiful bathrooms.
I speak for those children who cannot speak for themselves, children who have absolutely nothing but their courage and their smiles, their wits and their dreams.
Women should be tough, tender, laugh as much as possible, and live long lives. The struggle for equality continues unabated, and the woman warrior who is armed with wit and courage will be among the first to celebrate victory.
The well of true wit is truth itself.
There is more jealousy between rival wits than rival beauties, for vanity has no sex. But in both cases there must be pretensions, or there will be no jealousy.
He who will lose a present good for one in expectation hath some wit, but a small store of wisdom.
Is it possible your pragmatical worship should not know that the comparisons made between wit and wit, courage and courage, beauty and beauty, birth and birth, are always odious and ill taken?.
Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.
It look like the lord just work for wite folks cause ever sens i wasn nothin but a litle boy i been on my on haulin water to the fiel on that ol water cart wit all them dime bukets an that dipper just hittin an old dorthy just trottin and trottin an me up their hittin her wit that rope.
Wit, like the Belly, if it be not fed, Will starve the Members, and distract the Head.
Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.
While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.
Mockery is often the result of a poverty of wit.
He who cannot shine by thought, seeks to bring himself into notice by a witticism.
Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit.
It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.
A well-read writer, with good taste, is one who has the command of the wit of other men; he searches where knowledge is to be found; and though he may not himself excel in invention, his ingenuity may compose one of those agreeable books, the deliciæ of literature, that will out-last the fading meteors of his day.
If I had to describe my sense of humor, I would say it’s contemporary wit, you know what I’m saying?
She kindly laments that I am not of the party, and to be sure I honour great ladies, and I admire great wits, but I am of the same opinion in regard to assemblies that is held concerning oysters, that they are never good in a month that has not the letter R in it.
It is perhaps life’s greatest accomplishment to live to old age, maintaining one’s wits, one’s sense of humor, one’s health, and one’s charm.
New Year’s resolution: To refrain from saying witty, unkind things, unless they are really witty and irreparably damaging.
Writing well is at one and the same time good thinking, good feeling, and good expression; it is having wit, soul, and taste, all together.
The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.
There is no such thing as an acceptable level of unemployment, because hunger is not acceptable, poverty is not acceptable, poor health is not acceptable, and a ruined life is not acceptable.
Other female rappers are overly sexual, have no wit, and their lyrics are so generic. I want to change the game to make rap that shows I’m not a normal female rapper – it’s not about how rich I am, how much sex I have, or how many boyfriends I have. That’s just not me.
Il ne faut point donner d’esprit a’В В ses personnages; mais savoir les placer dans des circonstances qui leur en donnent. You should not give wit to your characters, but know instead how to put them in situations which will make them witty.
Less judgment than wit is more sail than ballast.
Women of no beauty may yet be flattered to believe they possess some; others of a moderate share that they have a great deal; but those of elegance and charm generally know the perfection of their external graces so well, that they seem to covet that flattery most which heightens the opinion of their wit and judgment.
I think I owe my life to cork soles.
Unless man has the wit and the grit to build his civilization on something better than material power, it is surely idle to talk of plans for a stable peace.
Of all questions, why? is the least pertinent. It begs the question; it assumes the larger part of its own response; to wit, that a sensible response exists.
Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.
Mary Daheim writes with wit, wisdom, and a big heart. I love her books.
Take a portion of wit, And fashion it fit, Like a needle, with point and with eye: A point that can wound, An eye to look round, And at folly or vice let it fly
Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.
I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.
Journeys end in lovers meeting; I have spent an all but sleepless night, I have told lies and made a fool of myself, and the very air tastes like wine. I have been frightened half out of my foolish wits, but I have somehow earned this joy; I have been waiting for it for so long.
When newspapers are the principal vehicles of the wit and wisdom of a people, the higher graces of composition can hardly be looked for.
Moment I stop havin fun wit it, I’ll be done wit it.
Remember that the wit, humour, and jokes of most mixed companies are local. They thrive in that particular soil, but will not often bear transplanting.
You beef wit me, I’m-a even the score equally. Take you on Jerry Springer and beat your ass legally.
If a man’s wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the schoolmen; for they are cymini sectores, splitters of hairs.
Wit and wisdom differ; wit is upon the sudden turn, wisdom is bringing about ends.
There must be love, and understanding, to betray. Most men haven’t the wit or the honor for betrayal: not to know it when they see it; not the stomach to apprehend it as they do it. Most men, blind and dumb in their self-centeredness, don’t betray: they merely disappoint.
Heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common.
Alas, how right the ancient saying is: We, who are old, are nothing else but noise And shape. Like mimicries of dreams we go, And have no wits, although we think us wise.
He’s a fool that marries, but he’s a greater that does not marry a fool; what is wit in a wife good for, but to make a man a cuckold?
The images of mens wits and knowledge remain in books. They generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages
I get it, I get it. I get it, I get it. Your hustle don’t ever go unnoticed baby, I’m wit you, I’m wit it.
Or yet in wise old Ravenclaw, if you’ve a ready mind, Where those of wit and learning, Will always find their kind.
Two goddesses now must Cyprus adore; The Muses are ten, and the Graces are four; Stella’s wit is so charming, so sweet her fair face, She shines a new Venus, a Muse, and a Grace.
Dad was synonymous with his charm and wit and grace, and it was sort of the perfect way to go for him.
How now, wit! Whither wander you?
Who can prove Wit to be witty when with deeper ground Dulness intuitive declares wit dull?
Wit is not levelled so much at the muscles as at the heart; and the latter will sometimes smile when there is not a single wrinkle on the cheek.
I think hip-hop does a very good job of infusing comedy and humor and wit into music, a lot more than other genres.
The only way therefore to try a Piece of Wit, is to translate it into a different Language: If it bears the Test you may pronounceit true; but if it vanishes in the Experiment you may conclude it to have been a Punn.
A proverb is the wisdom of many and the wit of one.
Go, little book, and wish to all
Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall,
A bin of wine, a spice of wit,
A house with lawns enclosing it,
A living river by the door,
A nightingale in the sycamore!
Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall,
A bin of wine, a spice of wit,
A house with lawns enclosing it,
A living river by the door,
A nightingale in the sycamore!
[On being told their loquacious, domineering host was ‘outspoken’:] By whom?
If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonal experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations.
Wit gives an edge to sense, and recommends it extremely.
Every age has its pleasures, its style of wit, and its own ways.
if anyone present wishes to make me the subject of his wit, I am very much at his service–with my sword–whenever he has leisure.
Giving votes in exchange for ideological support. To wit: identity politics for homosexuals.
Some of the best work done to combat the Republicans has been wit and humor.
Popular music had never had lyrical sophistication of this type [like Bob Dylan]; wit, to be sure, but “Darkness at the break of noon/Shadows even the silver spoon/The handmade blade, the child’s balloon/Eclipses both the sun and moon/To understand you know too soon/ There is no sense in trying”? No.
Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy.
One wit, like a knuckle of ham in soup, gives a zest and flavour to the dish, but more than one serves only to spoil the pottage.
Those who are born of parents broken with old age, or of such as are not yet ripe or are too young, or of drunkards, soft or effeminate men, want a great and liberal ingenuity or wit.
There is something reassuring about British-made products and their inventiveness and ingenuity, their creative spirit and eccentricity and their British wit and charm.
Malice blunts the point of wit.
Some men’s wit is like a dark lantern, which serves their own turn and guides them their own way, but is never known (according to the Scripture phrase) either to shine forth before men, or to glorify their Father in heaven.
As wit is too hard for power in council, so power is too hard for wit in action.
In due course we arrive, if wit can be said that we ever fully arrive. The truth is there are destinations beyond destinations and do the confirmed sailor goes on tacking forever.
If you run after wit, you will succeed in catching folly.
But assuming the same premises, to wit, that all men are equal by the law of nature and of nations, the right of property in slaves falls to the ground; for one who is equal to another cannot be the owner or property of that other.
In the early days, Jerry was an antagonist, which was arguably his best casting. ‘The King’s’ quick wit is perfectly suited to be an antagonist, but at the same time, he’s so funny that it is hard to hate Jerry Lawler as the villain – especially at this stage of his long career.
Abstracts, abridgments, summaries, etc., have the same use with burning-glasses,–to collect the diffused light rays of wit and learning in authors, and make them point with warmth and quickness upon the reader’s imagination.
Wit in women is a jewel, which, unlike all others, borrows lustre from its setting, rather than bestows it; since nothing is so easy as to fancy a very beautiful woman extremely witty.
Confidence contributes more to conversation than wit.
Anyway Ri Ri what rhymes wit your name really? Money got you vacationing in Chile
Benjamin Franklin went through life an altered man because he once paid too dearly for a penny whistle. My concern springs usually from a deeper source, to wit, from having bought a whistle when I did not want one.
The time the moon is going back, the blood that is in a person does be weakening, but when the moon is strong, the blood that moves strong in the same way. And it to be at the full, it drags the wits along with it, the same as it drags the tide.
In the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money cannot buy…to wit–the wag of a dog’s tail.
Shoulda sent a thank you note, you little hoe Now Imma wrap your coffin wit a bow
Impropriety is the soul of wit.
Men whose wit has been mother of villainy once have learned from it to be evil in all things.
At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.
In all thy humours, whether grave or mellow, Thou’rt such a touchy, testy, pleasant fellow, Hast so much wit and mirth and spleen about thee, There is no living with thee, nor without thee.
Wit resembles a coquette; those who the most eagerly run after it are the least favored.
Muster your wits; stand in your own defence.
My wit is sharper then the finest mustache, and when I walk among men I make truths ring like spurs.
I appreciate simplicity, true beauty that lasts over time, and a little wit and eclecticism that make life more fun.
Children are a plant substitute and we haven’t the wit to see it until too late
True wit has a grave intention.
What’s up wit these new niggas? And why they think it all come so easy?
His jest will savour but of shallow wit, When thousands weep, more than did laugh at it.
With the latitude of unbounded scurrility, it is easy enough to attain the character of a wit, especially when it is considered how wonderfully pleasant it is to the generality of the public to see the folly of their acquaintance exposed by a third person.
My mother studied English and drama at the University of Pennsylvania, where my father studied architecture. She was a great influence in all sorts of ways, a wicked wit.
In The Tricky Art of Co-Existing, Sandi Toksvig navigates life’s little dilemmas with wit and not-so-common sense. You’ll learn the strange history of common courtesy and the one true secret of social success: how to not drive everyone around you crazy.
The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.
The great charm of conversation consists less in the display of one’s own wit and intelligence than in the power to draw forth the resources of others.
If you strike upon a thought that baffles you, break off from that entanglement and try another, so shall your wits be fresh to start again.
When will conventional good manners become attractive? When will ladies of fashion exhibit their shoulders a little less and their affability and wit a little more?
Wit may do very well for a mistress, but [I] should prefer reason for a wife.
And here, I believe, the wit is generally misunderstood. In reality, it lies in desiring another to kiss your a– for having just before threatened to kick his; for I have observed very accurately, that no one ever desires you to kick that which belongs to himself, nor offers to kiss this part in another.
Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.
Sweat pants, hair tied, chillin wit no makeup on. That’s when you’re the prettiest, I hope that you don’t take it wrong.
It is sometimes forgotten how much wit there is in certain works of abstract art. There is a certain point in undergoing anguish when one encounters the comic.
It generally takes its rise either from an ill-will to mankind, a private inclination to make ourselves esteemed, an ostentation of wit, and vanity of being thought in the secrets of the world; or from a desire of gratifying any of these dispositions of mind in those persons with whom we converse.
When you are dealing with a child, keep all your wits about you, and sit on the floor.
Yet here I stand poor fool what more, not one wit wiser than before.
wit, wit! – I look upon it always as a draught of air; it cools indeed, but one gets a stiff neck from it.
Humor is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.
There is small disproportion betwixt a fool who useth not wit because he hath it not and him that useth it not when it should avail him.
That wit is truly amiable, which gladdens and enlivens every thing, which shines with a lustre gentle, but not faint, and powerful, but not glaring.
I can’t say whether we had more wit among us now than usual, but I am certain we had more laughing, which answered the end as well.
They have a plentiful lack of wit.
Elizabeth Searle writes with intelligence, passion and wit. She’s one of the best young writers around.
I can’t stay friends with anyone who doesn’t have a passion for something; and, generally speaking, artistic people, creative people carry it right into the kitchen, too. They have a zest for life; the excitement of living. All of the great eaters I’ve known are also men of great wit.
Bonds and the pangs of hunger are excellent prophet doctors for the wits.
I get the impression the English kings were witty, for some reason. I feel like all you had was your wit.
there is not the least wit in my nature. I am a very matter of fact, plain spoken being, and may blunder on the borders of a repartee for half an hour together without striking it out.
Reason is mechanical, wit chemical, and genius organic spirit.
‘T is an old maxim in the schools, That flattery ‘s the food of fools; Yet now and then your men of wit Will condescend to take a bit.
I’m so overexposed, I’m making Paris Hilton look like a recluse.
Who is’t that to woman’s beauty would submit,
And yet refuse the fetters of their wit?
And yet refuse the fetters of their wit?
What Time hath scanted men in hair, he hath given them in wit.
There is no estimating the wit and wisdom concealed and latent in our lower fellow mortals until made manifest by profound experiences; for it is through suffering that dogs as well as saints are developed and made perfect.
Modest plainness sets off sprightly wit,
For works may have more with than does ’em good,
As bodies perish through excess of blood.
For works may have more with than does ’em good,
As bodies perish through excess of blood.
If I was ever a rare fine summer person, that’s long ago. Most of us are half-and-half. The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we’ve stashed away. But there are times when we’re all autumn people.
The Cardinal is at his wit’s end – it is true that he had not far to go.
Do you need anything before I go? I want you to return my wits, I long to say.
Reply to wit with gravity, and to gravity with wit.
Wit is absolutely sociable spirit or aphoristic genius.
A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets people’s attention.
Wit and Humor – if any difference, it is in duration – lightning and electric light. Same material, apparently; but one is vivid, and can do damage – the other fools along and enjoys elaboration.
He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.
If he who has little wit needs a master to inform his stupidity, he who has much frequently needs ten to keep in check his worldly wisdom, which might otherwise, like a high-mettled charger, toss him to the ground.
Truth and beauty can still win battles. We need more art, more passion, more wit in defense of the Earth.
I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.
Intemperate wits will spare neither friend nor foe, and make themselves the common enemies of mankind.
I have had to change the game to one that is a match of wits rather than brawn to give myself a fighting chance.
There are some men who are witty when they are in a bad humor, and others only when they are sad.
A man of remarkable genius may afford to pass by a piece of wit, if it happen to border on abuse. A little genius is obliged to catch at every witticism indiscriminately.
Satire’s my weapon, but I’m too discreet To run amuck, and tilt at all I meet.
After I published a book called Lincoln’s Virtues a wit said that my next book should be Lincoln’s Vices. But in my opinion that would be a short book!
What a pretty thing man is when he goes in his doublet and hose and leaves off his wit!
That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.
Too much wit makes the world rotten.
Take back the beauty and wit you bestow upon me; leave me my own mediocrity of agreeableness and genius, but leave me also my sincerity, my constancy, and my plain dealing; ‘Tis all I have to recommend me to the esteem either of others or myself.
My father lived life to the fullest, even though it was cut short at a young age in 1962. He was known for his intelligence, wit, wisdom, a wonderful sense of humour, a great personality, and a genuine goodwill towards all.
… it is not the color of the skin that makes the man or the woman, but the principle formed in the soul. Brilliant wit will shine, come from whence it will; and genius and talent will not hide the brightness of its lustre.
In the minds and hearts of the American people, there is a great hunger for peace based on a universal recognition of the values of freedom and human dignity.
No man is so much a fool as not to have wit enough sometimes to be a knave; nor any so cunning a knave as not to have the weakness sometimes to play the fool.
Mass communication–wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued–presents us wit a serious daner, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. (p. 73)
Cleverness is like rouge – liberal application makes a woman look common and desperate. Wit is knowing how to apply it.
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.
We cannot use a double standard for measuring our own and other people’s policies. Our demands for democratic practices in other lands will be no more effective than the guarantees of those practiced in our own country.
[To Jean Harlow, who repeatedly mispronounced her first name:] No, no, Jean. The t is silent, as in Harlow.
A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.
The best prophet is common sense, our native wit.
Wit lies in recognizing the resemblance among things which differ and the difference between things which are alike.
I have no more pleasure in hearing a man attempting wit and failing, than in seeing a man trying to leap over a ditch and tumbling into it
A Wise man knows that much of what he says and does is commonplace and trivial. His thoughts are not all solemn and sacred in his own eyes. He is able to laugh at himself and is not offended when others make him a subject whereon to exercise their wit.
And the people who live in the southern part of my state do not have a secure environment. To wit, there are signs that the government put up that say, “Warning. You are in a drug smuggling area and a human smuggling area.”
You don’t learn algebra with your blessed soul. Can’t you look at it with your clear simple wits?
Coffee: Induces wit. Good only if it comes through Havre. After a big dinner party it is taken standing up. Take it without sugar – very swank: gives the impression you have lived in the East.
Though it is evident, that not more than one age or people can deserve the censure of being more averse from learning than any other, yet at all times knowledge must have encountered impediments, and wit been mortified with contempt, or harassed with persecution.
There is a lot of difference between failure and defeat. Failure is when you are defeated and neither learn nor contribute anything.
Genuine witticisms surprise those who say them as much as those who listen to them; they arise in us in spite of us, or, at least, without our participation,–like everything inspired.
When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum.
If she be fair and wise, fairness and wit,
The one’s for use, the other useth it.
The one’s for use, the other useth it.
We can look forward to four more years of wonderful, inspirational speeches full of wit, poetry, music, love and affection, plus more goddamn nonsense.
Anonymity is an abused privilege, abused most by people who mistake vitriol for wisdom and cynicism for wit.
Many species of wit are quite mechanical; these are the favorites of witlings, whose fame in words scarce outlives the remembrance of their funeral ceremonies.
Both wit and understanding are trifles without integrity.
States of profound happiness, like all other forms of intoxication, are apt to befuddle the wits; intense enjoyment of the present always makes one forget the past.
He thought he was a wit, and he was half right.
If brevity is the soul of wit then brevity and levity are the whole of it.
Wit is the unexpected copulation of ideas.
Good writing and dark wit always excite me and they come together thrillingly in this book. It has a quiet grip on the strangeness of the interior and exterior worlds of love and politics. I delighted in the writing and the scope.
The best thing next to wit is a consciousness that it is not in us; without wit, a man might then know how to behave himself, so as not to appear to be a fool or a coxcomb.
If folly disappeared, wit would starve.
You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.
Converse with men makes sharp the glittering wit, But God to man doth speak in solitude.
Wisdom is better than wit, and in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.
To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.
Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows not how to use it discreetly.
Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.
Satire is an abuse of wit. It corrects few evils.
Words may show a man’s wit but actions his meaning.
Your wits make others witty.
I value each woman for what she has to offer whether it be charm-beauty-wit-intelligence or humor but warmth is the quality I value most.
Ohhh, I’m in luv, I’m in luv
I’m in luv, I’m in luv wit chu
And there ain’t nothin nobody can say cuz
You’re the one for me baby
I’m in luv, I’m in luv wit chu
And there ain’t nothin nobody can say cuz
You’re the one for me baby
I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t know the answer
It was while Princess Margaret was attending a high-society party in New York that the hostess asked her politely how the Queen was keeping. “Which one?” she is reported to have replied with her typically razor-sharp wit. “My sister, my mother or my husband?
I’m a silly guy, I love wit and cynicism and sarcasm.
He was my equal in beauty, a paragon of grace and charm, sparkling with wit, and burning with love. I adored him to distraction, to the point of idolatry: I loved him as one can never love twice.
A wise man will live as much within his wit as his income…. Bear this truth always in your mind, that you may be admired for your wit, if you have any; but that nothing but good sense and good qualities can make you be loved.
swearing is, as I have said, learning to the ignorant, eloquence to the blockhead, vivacity to the stupid, and wit to the coxcomb.
Ah Fate, cannot a man Be wise without a beard? East, West, from Beer to Dan, Say, was it never heard That wisdom might in youth be gotten, Or wit be ripe before ‘t was rotten?
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/ Who says my hand a needle better fits./ A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong/ For such despite they cast on female wits;/ If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,/ They’ll say it’s stolen, or else, it was by chance.
Repartee is perfect when it effects its purpose with a double edge. It is the highest order of wit, as it indicates the coolest yet quickest exercise of genius, at a moment when the passions are roused.
Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.
If wits were pins, the man would be a veritable hedgehog.
A cabaret song has got to be written – for the middle voice, ideally – because you’ve got to hear the wit of the words. And a cabaret song gives the singer room to act, more even than an opera singer.
Wit is an intermittent fountain; kindness is a perennial spring.
Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts- O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power So to seduce!
I wonder how anyone can have the face to condemn others when he reflects upon his own thoughts.
A wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits.
To be witty is not enough. One must possess sufficient wit to avoid having too much of it.
Laugh not too much; the witty man laughs least: For wit is news only to ignorance. Lesse at thine own things laugh; lest in the jest Thy person share, and the conceit advance.
Our erected wit maketh us to know what perfection is.
I never have wit until I am below stairs.
[Fr., Je n’ai jamais d’esprit qu’au bas de l’escalier.]
[Fr., Je n’ai jamais d’esprit qu’au bas de l’escalier.]
Many live by their wits but few by their wit.
There is an old maxim which states that good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from poor judgment. I think something similar can be said of government policy, to wit: Good policy comes from experience, and experience comes from poor policy.
Think of brilliant trickster Vik Muniz as the offspring of Man Ray and Jacques Henri Lartigue, combining the former’s relentless experimentation, the latter’s effortless wit, and their mutual inventiveness in work that defies category.
Upon meeting, you’re judged by your clothes, upon parting you’re judged by your wits.
Whatever has “wit enough to keep it sweet” defies corruption and outlasts all time; but the wit must be of that outward and visible order which needs no introduction or demonstration at our hands.
What do you do with mother love and mother wit when the babies are grown and gone away?
Courage ought to be guided by skill, and skill armed by courage. Neither should hardiness darken wit, nor wit cool hardiness. Be valiant as men despising death, but confident as unwonted to be overcome.
It is a poor wit who lives by borrowing the words, decisions, mien, inventions and actions of others.
[A]ll the ingenious men, and all the scientific men, and all the fanciful men, in the world,… could never invent, if all their wits were boiled into one, anything so curious and so ridiculous as a lobster.
Mr. Rochester never courted Jane Eyre, Tessa pointed out. No, he dressed up as a woman and terrified the poor girl out of her wits. Is that what you want?
Wit can be beautiful, because it expresses and distills an idea.
The Sarajevans have a very particular world view – a mordant wit coupled with this unbearable sadness and… truckloads of guts, you know.
I will keep where there is wit stirring, and leave the faction of fools.
I have found nothing half so good / As my long-planned half solitude, / Where I can sit up half the night / With some friend that has the wit.
New technologies make it possible for even the mass marketer to assume the role of a small proprietor, doing business again wit individuals, one at a time.
Wits, like drunken men with swords, are apt to draw their steel upon their best acquaintances.
The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.
The belly (i.e. necessity) is the teacher of art and the liberal bestower of wit.
If you don’t know where you are currently standing, you’re dead.
The life of a wit is a warfare upon earth.
Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust, Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust.
All this is rather pretentious and fey to even talk about, but Flannery O’Connor sat down to write stories. The rest of us, some of us, don’t have that kind of wit and genius. We don’t do that. We sit down and have some accidents.
Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,–is not that mine? His wit,–if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.
We do not claim that punning is legitimate wit. Wit consists in combination of ideas, punning in combination of words only. We wonder at the one, but we laugh at the drollery of the other – as the world goes a pun is regarded as an imponderable commodity, all know the rank it holds in the order of pure intellect.
For wit and judgment often are at strife, Though meant each other’s aid, like man and wife.
The true touchstone of wit is the impromptu.
A thing well said will be wit in all languages.
As in smooth oil the razor best is whet, So wit is by politeness sharpest set; Their want of edge from their offence is seen, Both pain us least when exquisitely keen.
[On being asked in her later years if she were Tallulah:] I’m what’s left of her, dahling.
It is a great misfortune not to possess sufficient wit to speak well, nor sufficient judgment to keep silent.
Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.
You have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.
Wit is brushwood; judgment, timber; the one gives the greatest flame, the other yields the most durable heat; and both meeting make the best fire.
It is one of the triumphs of human wit … to conquer by humility and submissiveness … to make oneself small in order to appear great … such … are often the expedients of the neurotic.
After wisdom comes wit.
All that stock of arguments [the skeptics] produce to depreciate our faculties, and make mankind appear ignorant and low, are drawn principally from this head, to wit, that we are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things.
(R)eality TV (is) a medium dedicated to the proposition that with the help of judicious editing, carefully chosen half-wits can hold the attention of millions of their fellow half-wits for weeks on end.
This man [Chesterfield], I thought, had been a Lord among wits; but I find he is only a wit among Lords.
A trial is still an ordeal by battle. For the broadsword there is the weight of evidence; for the battle-ax the force of logic; for the sharp spear, the blazing gleam of truth; for the rapier, the quick and flashing knife of wit.
Wit is more necessary than beauty; and I think no young woman ugly that has it, and no handsome woman agreeable without it.
His fine wit Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it.
Not a time with him passed that I didn’t say, “You should’ve been a comedian.” [Vincent Price] was hilarious. He was just such a quick, funny wit. I don’t think most people would think that about him, and it was really surprising to me. But man, the guy had a brilliant wit.
Wit is the only wall between us and the dark.
I envy no quality of the mind or intellect in others; not genius, power, wit, nor fancy; but, if I could choose what would be most delightful, and, I believe, most useful to me, I should prefer a firm religious belief to every other blessing.
There’s a lot of heart to Bob’s work that doesn’t always get recognized because of all of the sensuality, dark statements and wit of his work.
Perhaps, as some wit remarked, the best proof that there is Intelligent Life in Outer Space is the fact it hasn’t come here. Well, it can’t hide forever – one day we will overhear it.
Almost everybody in the neighborhood had troubles, frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had complications. To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years wit
I’d like to introduce a man with a lot of charm, talent, and wit. Unfortunately, he couldn’t be here tonight, so instead . . .
I’ve never, ever in my life touched a photographer. Some of the cruellest things I’ve ever said have been to photographers who are chasing me down the street, some of the sharpest, most efficient emotional barbs. And they know that in that moment, in that one-to-one wit competition, they just got smashed.
We find ourselves less witty in remembering what we have said than in dreaming of what we would have said.
To proportion the eagerness of contest to its importance seems too hard a task for human wisdom. The pride of wit has kept ages busy in the discussion of useless questions, and the pride of power has destroyed armies, to gain or to keep unprofitable possessions.
I love not serious documentaries, too, but I love seeing people at their wits’ end, I guess.
Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.
It was Will who broke the silence. “Very well. You have me alone in the corrider-” “Yes, yes,” said Tessa impatiently,”and thousands of women all over England would pay handsomely for the privilege of such an opportunity. Can we put aside the display of your wit for a moment? This is important.
One can have a wit, but not a witless
A man must have a good share of wit himself to endure a great share in another.
Great wits, like great beauties, look upon mere esteem as a flat insipid thing; nothing less than admiration will content them.
But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit – and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist – and a Catholic.
It is less dishonor to hear imperfectly than to speak imperfectly. The ears are excused; the understanding is not.
I loved Winnie the Pooh, the Disney character, and I loved his wit and warmth.
Wealth can be created. Wit and intelligence can’t.
What a measly epitaph that would make: ‘They saw it coming, but hadn’t the wit to stop it happening.’
Lord, enlighten thou our enemies. Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers: we are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom; their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength.
So have your wits about you, and do what you can and dig in, because it might not last.
Wine can of their wits the wise beguile, Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile
An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.
I enjoy my pettiness with a dose of wit.
What is this powerful have over my tub? Surely, I am transfixed by your firecracker charm and your suspended electrified wit.
If you don t know where you are, a map won’t help.
It seems with wit and good-nature, Utrum horum mavis accipe. Taste and good-nature are universally connected.
The Germans wit is in his fingers.
Nor sequent centuries could hitOrbit and sum of Shakespeare’s wit.
Who would not give up wit for power and beauty?
What clever man has ever needed to commit a crime? Crime is the last resort of political half-wits.
Moral sentences appear ostentatious and tumid, when they have no greater occasions than the journey of a wit to his home town: yet such pleasures and such pains make up the general mass of life; and as nothing is little to him that feels it with gre
The great Creator to revere
Must sure become the creature;
But still the preaching cant forbear,
And ev’n the rigid feature:
Yet ne’er with wits profane to range
Be complaisance extended;An atheist laugh’s a poor exchange
For deity offended.
Must sure become the creature;
But still the preaching cant forbear,
And ev’n the rigid feature:
Yet ne’er with wits profane to range
Be complaisance extended;An atheist laugh’s a poor exchange
For deity offended.
For as the body grows old, so the wits grow old and become blind towards all things alike.
Leonard Cohen can give you “Leonard Cohen” – the self-deprecating wit, the slow, considered speech, the perfectly-honed anecdote – Tom Waits is far more comfortable giving a journalist “Tom Waits” the character, whose conversation is really a series of strange tales, learned or ad-libbed.
Love all. Trust a few. Do wrong to none. This above all: to thine own self be true. No legacy is so rich as honesty. Brevity is the soul of wit
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.
Don’t fall in love with your wit. Your cleverly turned phrase may not, as you hope, show off how much gray matter you have, especially if the phrase is at someone else’s expense.
Wit catches of wit, as fire of fire.
Men have begun to observe and classify, they turn from creation to Criticism… It is the Fashion to be a wit… one must be able to conceal indecency with elegant diction; manners are everything, morals nothing.
…for though she was ordinary, she possessed health, wit, courage, charm, and cheerfulness. But because she was not beautiful, no one ever seemed to notice these other qualities, which is so often the way of the world.
There is a monsterous deal of stupid quizzing, & common-place nonsense talked, but scarcely any wit.
Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.
Women’s beauty, like men’s wit, is generally fatal to the owners.
In thy discourse, if thou desire to please;
All such is courteous, useful, new, or wittie:
Usefulness comes by labour, wit byease;
Courtesie grows in court; news in the citie.
All such is courteous, useful, new, or wittie:
Usefulness comes by labour, wit byease;
Courtesie grows in court; news in the citie.
He who doesn’t lose his wits over certain things has no wits to lose.
A satirist, often in danger himself, has the bravery of knowing that to withhold wit’s conjecture is to endanger the species.
Wit is that which has been often thought, but never before was well expressed.
The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.
Imagine sitting down to an eight ounce steak, and then, imagine the room filled wit 45 to 50 people with empty bowls…For the feed cost of your steak, each of their bowls could be filled with a cup pf cooked cereal grains.
Wit lies in the likeness of things that are different, and in the difference of things that are alike.
Nearly all Americans felt they knew JFK intimately, his charm and wit regularly lighting up the television screen at home. This is why polls showed that millions of Americans took his assassination like a ‘death in the family.’
Listen carefully to what country people call mother wit. In those homely sayings are couched the collective wisdom of generations.
Soon as I see her walk up in the club, I’m a flirt. Winking eyes at me, when I roll up on them dubs, I’m a flirt. Sometimes when I’m with my chick on the low, I’m a flirt. And when she’s wit her man looking at me, damn right, I’m a flirt.
My visions and fantasies are pretty standard. The only difference is I got to do it, while most of us haven’t. Beyond that, I’m a pretty standard guy. Give me a gal with a sense of humor, acidic wit, who’s read a few books and has a body like a Swedish speed skater, and I’m quite content.
As soon as somebody falls in love, all the wits seem to dribble out of the bottom of his head.
Wit is educated insolence.
Passion very often makes the wisest men fools, and very often too inspires the greatest fools with wit.
In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned – or the very brilliant – dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person’s work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.
The fairest blossoms of pleasantry thrive best where the sun is not strong enough to scorch, nor the soil rank enough to corrupt.
A funny person is funny only for so long, but a wit can sit down and go on being spellbinding forever. One is not meant to laugh. One stays quiet and marvels. Spontaneously witty talk is without question the most fascinating entertainment there is.
I will not wage war against women and children! I have instructed my air force to limit their attacks to military objectives. However, if the enemy should conclude from this that he might get away with waging war in a different manner he will receive an answer that he’ll be knocked out of his wits!
I hold a mouses wit not worth a leke, That hath but on hole for to sterten to.
In this time of national crises…per haps we would do well to spend a few minutes in considering projects which grace and embellish the earth, instead of shaking it.
Comedy comes with a bit of sarcasm, wit and edginess.
Wit is so shining a quality that everybody admires it; most people aim at it, all people fear it, and few love it unless in themselves. A man must have a good share of wit himself to endure a great share of it in another.
There are nine orders of angels, to wit, angels, archangels, virtues, powers, principalities, dominations, thrones, cherubim, and seraphim
Blue Boy proves that if you don’t quite fit in, then you might as well stand out with as much wit, color and audacity as you can muster.
Poets like painters, thus unskilled to trace The naked nature and the living grace, With gold and jewels cover ev’ry part, And hide with ornaments their want of art. True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.
Irreverence is easy – what’s hard is wit.
I definitely did look up to John. We all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest.
It is not virtue, wisdom, valour, wit,
Strength, comeliness of shape, or amplest merit,
That woman’s love can win, or long inherit;
But what it is, hard is to say,
Harder to hit.
Strength, comeliness of shape, or amplest merit,
That woman’s love can win, or long inherit;
But what it is, hard is to say,
Harder to hit.
Reggie Watts is a most unusual talent: a huge vocal range, a natural musicality, and a sidesplitting wit. Is he a comedian? A singer? A performance artist? I’ve seen him a few times since then and I still can’t decide. Whatever, he ain’t like nobody else.
You can fake intelligence, but you can’t fake wit.
…he had a fascinating technique of gnawing his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other, as if his teeth were equipped with trolley tracks, and suddenly grabbing it out and gesticulating wit it before he jammed it back.
Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones.
[on BBC’s Sherlock] It’s a rare challenge, both for the audience and an actor, to take part in something with this level of intelligence and wit. You have to really enjoy it. It’s a form of mental and physical gymnastics.
Brevity may be the soul of wit, but not when someone’s saying “I love you.
The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.
I believe in wishing my colleagues and other celebs in a manner that brings my wit out and gives people a talking point. But there are people who love and those who hate you. That’s part of a celeb’s life.
My dreams are who I’m racin wit but you can see I’m pacin it so that I’m always chasin it.
Unhappy is that Grandeur which makes us too great to be good; and that Wit which sets us at a distance from true Wisdom.
The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram; and the proverbs of nations, which embody the commonsense of nations, have the brisk concussion of the most sparkling wit.
I’ll be there for you, I will care for you, I keep thinking you just don’t know. Tryna run from that, say you’re done wit that, on your face girl it just don’t show.
To have a reputation for being noble, she thought, is more confining than to be known as a wit. On the rare days when a comedian has no jokes, people pardon the lapse. There is no forgiving a saint’s occasional day of sin.
I think British journalists do well in America because the newspaper culture there is so strong – telling stories and presenting them readably is in their DNA. British newspapers get a terrible rap, but they are brilliant in their presentation, most of them, so full of vitality and literary wit.
[The Cretans have] more wit than words.
Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
Many useful and valuable books lie buried in shops and libraries, unknown and unexamined, unless some lucky compiler opens them by chance, and finds an easy spoil of wit and learning.
Louers be war and tak gude heid about Quhome that ye lufe, for quhome ye suffer paine. I lat yow wit, thair is richt few thairout Quhome ye may traist to haue trew lufe agane.
Your wit is always such a delight, Mr. Zeklos. I can barely contain myself around it.
Wine works the heart up, wakes the wit,
There is no cure ‘gainst age but it
There is no cure ‘gainst age but it
Wit is the most rascally, contemptible, beggarly thing on the face of the earth.
The speech of one who utters with his tongue what he thinks with his ear, and feels the pride of a creator in accomplishing the feat of a parrot. A means (under Providence) of setting up as a wit without a capital of sense.
I pity the shrimp that matches wits with you Jeeves
Fine sense and exalted sense are not half so useful as common sense. There are forty men of wit for one man of sense; and he that will carry nothing about him but gold, will be every day at a loss for want of readier change.
The man that walks wit crowd, will get no farther than the crowd. The man that walks alone, will reach places unknown.
Freedom, where are you? Who holds you back? […] The mother of wit and pleasure, Oh freedom!
Calculus is the most powerful weapon of thought yet devised by the wit of man.
Wit saves us from being swallowed whole by life.
I really like sardonicism and wit. I love the writing of Joy Williams and Lorrie Moore. I like Tina Fey, Amy Schumer.
Rich apparel has strange virtues; it makes him that hath it without means esteemed for an excellent wit; he that enjoys it with means puts the world in remembrance of his means.
This is the first generation in all of recorded history that can do something about the scourge of poverty. We have the means to do it. We can banish hunger from the face of the earth.
It is a certain rule that wit and passion are entirely incompatible. When the affections are moved, there is no place for the imagination.
Comedy has to be done en clair. You can’t blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.
With little wit and ease to suit them, They whirl in narrow circling trails, Like kittens playing with their tails.
Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
I’m a quick wit, straight to the point, no nonsense.
Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.
Belief in form, but disbelief in content – that’s what makes an aphorism charming.
They say the streets is a demon in a dress,
Wit dollar signs in her eyes and semen on her breath
Wit dollar signs in her eyes and semen on her breath
A small degree of wit, accompanied by good sense, is less tiresome in the long run than a great amount of wit without it.
If wit is the most sophisticated form of humor, pranks are the most juvenile.
A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.
Come Sleep! Oh Sleep, the certain knot of peace, the baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe, the poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release, the indifferent judge between the high and low.
As empty vessels make the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are the greatest blabbers
Wit is a form of force that leaves the limbs at rest.
We pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success.
Humor is the truth; wit is an exaggeration of the truth.
Generosity without delicacy, like wit without judgment, generally gives as much pain as pleasure.
A fool who has a flash of wit creates astonishment and scandal, like hack-horses setting out to gallop.
For the May Day is the great day,
Sung along the old straight track.
And those who ancient lines did ley
Will heed this song that calls them back…
Pass the cup, and pass the Lady,
And pass the plate to all who hunger,
Pass the wit of ancient wisdom,
Pass the cup of crimson wonder.
Sung along the old straight track.
And those who ancient lines did ley
Will heed this song that calls them back…
Pass the cup, and pass the Lady,
And pass the plate to all who hunger,
Pass the wit of ancient wisdom,
Pass the cup of crimson wonder.
Wit is a comic’s defense weapon.
One that hath wine as a chain about his wits, such a one lives no life at all.
There are many wise men that have secret hearts and transparent countenances.
I think puns are not just the lowest form of wit, but the lowest form of human behavior.
It may be remarked in general, that the laugh of men of wit is for the most part but a feint, constrained kind of half-laugh, as such persons are never without some diffidence about them; but that of fools is the most honest, natural, open laugh in the world.
Unlike some men, I had never drunk for boldness or charm or wit; I had used alcohol for precisely what it was, a depressant to check the mental exhilaration produced by extended sobriety.
The commercial class has always mistrusted verbal brilliancy and wit, deeming such qualities, perhaps with some justice, frivolous and unprofitable.
I think a lot of people underestimate the physical demands required to be a top model. It’s not just what you’re doing on set, it’s the strength you have to have to survive in a cutthroat industry. It’s the quick wit and the quick thinking on your feet in certain situations.
A man does not please long when he has only species of wit.
For my own part I think no innocent species of wit or pleasantry should be suppressed: and that a good pun may be admitted among the smaller excellencies of lively conversation.
Expose foes wit my hocus pocus flows, they froze now suckas idolize my chosen blows
He seemeth to be most ignorant that trusteth most to his wit.
Wit beyond measure is a man’s greatest treasure.
and I laugh, I can still laugh, who can’t laugh when the whole thing is so ridiculous that only the insane, the clowns, the half-wits, the cheaters, the whores, the horseplayers, the bankrobbers, the poets … are interesting?
Oh that’s what he left? Let his mama pick it up. Might back up on it, VROOM VROOM wit the pick-up truck.
The real challenge lies in maintaining dignity while being funny. I am in awe of Krushna Abhishek’s energy and Bharti Singh’s wit. They are infectious and selfless.
Science is history arranged according to the superstition and taste of the moment. The vocabulary of scholars has no wit, no salt. These heavy tomes have no soul, they are filled with distress.
For, until the wisdom of men bear some proportion to the wisdom of God, their attempts to find out the structure of his works, by the force of their wit and genius, will be vain.
There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike – information and wit
If you spend word for word with me, I shall make your wit bankrupt.
Didn’t you have any sadistic nannies who told you these tales to keep you quiet and well behaved at night? Heavens, what’s to become of the Empire if governesses have lost their touch for scaring the wits out of their girls?
He is a first-rate collector who can, upon all occasions, collect his wits.
To try to save for everyone, for the hostile and independent as well as the committed, some of the health that flows down across the green ridges from the skyline, and some of the beauty and spirit that are still available to any resident of the valley who has a moment and the wit to lift up his eyes unto the hills.
If you don’t know where you’re going any road will do
Imagination at wit’s end spreads its sad wings.
Wit is the most dangerous talent you can possess. It must be guarded with great discretion and good-nature, otherwise it will create you many enemies.
Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland, there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit and talent… Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.
Grief hath two tongues; and never woman yet
Could rule them both without ten women’s wit.
Could rule them both without ten women’s wit.
There seems almost a general wish of descrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.
From purest wells of English undefiled None deeper drank than he, the New World’s Child, Who in the language of their farm field spoke The wit and wisdom of New England folk.
Some people seem born with a head in which the thin partition that divides great wit from folly is wanting.
Keynes was scarcely a ‘revolutionary’ in any real sense. He possessed the tactical wit to dress up ancient statist and inflationist fallacies with modern, pseudoscientific jargon, making them appear to be the latest findings of economic science.
Have you seen them?” he asked. Arrow looked at him disinterestedly. Will frowned. Not talking, eh?” he said. “Maybe you’re a little hoarse.” He cackled breifly at his own wit.
Wit sometimes enables us to act rudely with impunity.
The more wit we have, the less satisfied we are with it.
[When asked at age 79 why her Paris apartment was located up many flights of stairs at the top of the building:] It’s the only way I can still make the hearts of men beat faster.
I don’t like jokes in speeches. I do like wit and humor. A joke is to humor what pornography is to erotic language in a good novel.
There must be more malice than love in the hearts of all wits.
If thou hast wit and learning, add to it wisdom and modesty.
Economists and technologists bring the “bits”, but it requires the social scientists and humanists to bring the “wits.
Good wits jump; a word to the wise is enough.
Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory.
Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.
There are just certain things that turn my head. It may be a girl’s sense of humor, it may be her wit, or her belief system; it could be a lot of different things.
My wits begin to turn.
I never have frustrations. The reason is to wit: Of at first I don’t succeed, I quit!
There are times when I prefer a cerebral moment with an artist, and I’ll just enjoy the wit of a Picabia or a Duchamp. It amuses me that they thought that what they did would be a good way of making art.
Every witticism is an inexact thought; that which is perfectly true is imperfectly witty.
Young gentlemen with literary aspirations usually start a new university magazine, which for wit and pungency is designed to eclipse all such previous efforts, and I was no exception in the matter of this popular gambit.
Time is always wanting to me, and I cannot meet with a single day when I am nut hurried along, driven to by wits’-end by urgent work, business to attent do or some service to render.
My dad was a very funny man – he’s the one who taught me life would be awfully hard without humor! I’m sure his Irish wit in some way influenced my decision to become an actress.
President Reagan achieved such successes because when you sat in a room with him, there could be over 1,000 people in the room, yet you felt like there was only the two of you, and his wonderful wit would put you at ease. That was a tremendous gift.
A funny person is funny only for so long, but a wit can sit down and go on being spellbinding forever.
I hate the countrie’s dirt and manners, yet I love the silence; I embrace the wit; A courtship, flowing here in full tide. But loathe the expense, the vanity and pride. No place each way is happy.
If, like me, you’ve never watched ‘Game of Thrones’, the podcast ‘Binge Mode: ‘Game of Thrones” ought to be unlistenable. It isn’t, thanks to the energy of the two expert presenters Mallory Rubin and Jason Concepcion, who have the wit to laugh at their own deep-dive devotion and are helped out by some smart editing.
There is not less wit nor invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought. Cardinal du Perron has been heard to say that the happy application of a verse of Virgil has deserved a talent.
Humour is the making others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously; wit is the pointing out and ridiculing that absurdity consciously, and with more or less ill-nature.
Disability is articulated as a struggle, an unnecessary burden that one must overcome to the soundtrack of a string crescendo. But disabled lives are multi-faceted – brimming with personality, pride, ambition, love, empathy, and wit.
Most people affirm pleasure to be the good, but the finer sort of wits say it is knowledge.
My brother Billy was the joke teller. My brother Jim had a really sharp, cutting wit. And the teller of long stories, that was my brother Ed. As a child, I just absorbed everything they said, and I was always in competition for the laughs.
Rappers are in danger
Who will use wits to be a remainder?
Who will use wits to be a remainder?
Like a sprained ankle boy I aint nothin to play wit
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
I learnt so much wit, really, from the Globe audiences. If you can make a circle, even in a proscenium theater, if you can get a circular energy going, so that all these people are involved with it and present, then there is something curious that happens with the imagination.
That’s what cricket’s all about: two batsmen pitting their wits against one another
I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.
Those who object to wit are envious of it.
When a man is at his wits’ end it is not a cowardly thing to pray, it is the only way he can get in touch with Reality.
No man is the wiser for his learning; it may administer matter to work in, or objects to work upon; but wit and wisdom are born with a man.
Writing, madam, is a mechanic part of wit. A gentleman should never go beyond a song or a billet.
When we say, ‘One nation under God, with liberty and justice for all’, we are talking about all people. We either ought to believe it or quit saying it .
And writers say, as the most forward bud
Is eaten by the canker ere it blow,
Even so by love the young and tender wit
Is turn’d to folly, blasting in the bud,
Losing his verdure even in the prime,
And all the fair effects of future hopes.
Is eaten by the canker ere it blow,
Even so by love the young and tender wit
Is turn’d to folly, blasting in the bud,
Losing his verdure even in the prime,
And all the fair effects of future hopes.
Wit is so shining a quality that everybody admires it; most people aim at it, all people fear it, and few love it unless in themselves. A man must have a good share of wit himself to endure a great share of it in another.
There is a certain majesty in simplicity which is far above all the quaintness of wit.
It may be said that his wit shines at the expense of his memory.
For those with drive, wit, vision, ego and a masochistic outlook, there is always room.
The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.
We are given two of most of our body parts, either opposites or similarities, but not the tongue; except for my wife’s which is forked.
Why was I chosen?’ ‘Such questions cannot be answered,’ said Gandalf. ‘You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess. But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.
If thy wealth waste, they wit will give but small warmth.
So many heads so many wits.
The wit, wisdom and insights of a different person are often unpalatable, weird and absurd to the senses of many ordinary people.
The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment.
Among the Diaries beginning with the second quarter of our century, there is frequent mention of a lady then becoming famous for her beauty and her wit: “an unusual combination,” in the deliberate syllables of one of the writers, who is, however, not disposed to personal irony when speaking of her.
Fashions smile has given wit to dullness and grace to deformity, and has brought everything into vogue, by turns, but virtue.
A man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long.
Few influential people involved with the Internet claim that it is a good in and of itself. It is a powerful tool for solving social problems, just as it is a tool for making money, finding lost relatives, receiving medical advice, or, come to that, trading instructions for making bombs.
A proverb is one man’s wit and all men’s wisdom.
True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d; Something whose truth convinced at sight we find, That gives us back the image of our mind. As shades more sweetly recommend the light, So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit.
My work requires acting at its most committed – it demands actors of enormous resilience, but also intelligence and wit. It doesn’t work for narcissistic or selfish actors.
Nothing is so fatiguing as the life of a wit.
Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.
I grow in worth, and wit, and sense, Unboding critic-pen, Or that eternal want of pence, Which vexes public men.
…but I should say that kindliness, and sincerity, and if I may say so–modesty–are worth far more to a man, to a husband, than all the wit and beauty in the world.
Wit and puns aren’t just dГ©cor in the mind; they’re essential signs that the mind knows it’s on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.
Wit is cultured insolence.
Happy the country that lives on nothing but its wits; cursed be the one that thinks it can get rich by planting or digging or drilling for wealth.
Digression is the soul of wit.
I love Tom Cruise. When Penelope Cruz is through with him, I’m next.
Lust is an enemy to the purse, a foe to the person, a canker to the mind, a corrosive to the conscience, a weakness of the wit, a besotter of the senses, and finally, a mortal bane to all the body.
Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.
The wit of man has devised cruel statutes,
And nature oft permits what is by law forbid.
And nature oft permits what is by law forbid.
Oh! a private buffoon is a light-hearted loon,
If you listen to popular rumour;
From morning to night he’s so joyous and bright,
And he bubbles with wit and good humour!
If you listen to popular rumour;
From morning to night he’s so joyous and bright,
And he bubbles with wit and good humour!
The girl that I wanna save is like a danger to my health
Try being wit somebody that wanna be somebody else.
Try being wit somebody that wanna be somebody else.
A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.
If a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again.
You have a ready wit. Tell me when it’s ready.
The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
No man is so much a fool as not to have wit enough sometimes to be a knave; nor any so cunning a knave as not to have the weakness sometimes to play the fool.
Wit and judgment often are at strife.
All human race would be wits. And millions miss, for one that hits.
The liveliest effusions of wit and humour are simply what the reader of a novel has a right to expect.
Wit lives in the present, but genius survives the future.
A Christian’s wit is offensive light,
A beam that aids, but never grieves the sight;
Vig’rous in age as in the flush of youth,
‘Tis always active on the side of truth.
A beam that aids, but never grieves the sight;
Vig’rous in age as in the flush of youth,
‘Tis always active on the side of truth.
Jealousy, an eminently credulous and suspicious passion, allows fancy the greatest possible play. But it does not bestow wit, it banishes all sense.
Man can not live by bread alone … he must have peanut butter.
So now I’m rollin’ down Rodeo wit a shotgun, These people ain’t seen a brown skin man, Since their grandparents bought one
It takes great wit and interest and energy to be happy. The pursuit of happiness is a great activity. One must be open and alive. It is the greatest feat man has to accomplish.
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.
Witticisms are fire-arms, that make a noise and give pain.
I’ll be right here in my spot wit a lil more cash than I already got trippin off you cause you had your shot
Female movie stars from the pre-Code era of Hollywood, like Mae West, could be so raunchy and witty before they were edited. Sometimes they could go further in their wit than we go now.
I have long admired Caroline Leavitt’s probing insight into people, her wit and compassion, her ability to find humor in dark situations, and conversely, her tenderness towards characters.
Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.
This fellow pecks up wit, as pigeons peas; And utters it again when God doth please: He is wit’s pedler; and retails his wares.
It seems to be saying perpetually; ‘I am the end of the nineteenth century; I am glad they built me of iron; let me rust.’ … It is like a passing fool in a crowd of the University, a buffoon in the hall; for all the things in Paris has made, it alone has neither wits nor soul.
Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off? Six days of the week it soils With its sickening poison– Just for paying a few bills! That’s out of proportion.
And the people who live in the southern part of my state do not have a secure environment. To wit, there are signs that the government put up that say, ‘Warning. You are in a drug smuggling area and a human smuggling area.’
God is the God of the people who are at their wits end, who are right up against it with their backs to the wall, and He delights to come to our help when we need Him most.
Wit will never make a man rich, but there are places where riches will always make a wit.
Violins are the lively, forward, importunate wits, that distinguish themselves by the flourishes of imagination, sharpness of repartee, glances of satire, and bear away the upper part in every consort.
Women who are not living ought to spend all their time cracking jokes. In a rotten society women grow witty; making a heaven while they wait.
Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.
Wit, without wisdom, is salt without meat; and that is but a comfortless dish to set a hungry man down to.
In comedy, the witty style wins out over every mishap of the plot.
A man’s wits are better employed in bearing up under the misfortunes that lie upon him at present than in foreseeing those that may come upon him hereafter.
A man has to have sensibility, wit, mystery, tolerance, and strength… Romance also helps.
thy wit is a very bitter sweeting; it is a most sharp sauce.
Styles in wit change so.
Simplicity, wit, and good typography.
In a real fight, there ain’t no time and you’ve got to use your wits. If someone were threatening the life of my child, then I’d be a good fighter. If somebody just wanted to steal my wallet, well, maybe I wouldn’t worry about it so much.
Wit consists in knowing the resemblance of things that differ, and the difference of things that are alike.
Prithee don’t screw your wit beyond the compass of good manners.
But honest instinct comes a volunteer; Sure never to o’er-shoot, but just to hit, While still too wide or short in human wit.
Conceit causes more conversation than wit.
And the Prince stared at her like a man out of his wits.
A free man is he that, in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to.
The best song lyrics seem to me so artful, so brilliant, so warm and humorous, with both passion and wit, that my admiration is matched only by my envy.
No charm, no humor, no wit — and a personality which can only be described as ‘icky.’ .
When we had to survive on our wits, gather and kill our food from scratch and be more at the mercy of our environment than we are today, we probably had enough challenge to keep our brains healthy.
An epigram is the marriage of wit and wisdom; a wisecrack, their divorce.
How much wit, good-nature, indulgences, how many good offices and civilities, are required among friends to accomplish in some years what a lovely face or a fine hand does in a minute!
True melancholy breeds your perfect fine wit.
Wit is artificial; humor is natural. Wit is accidental; humor is inevitable. Wit is born of conscious effort; humor, of the allotted ironies of fate. Wit can be expressed only in language; humor can be developed sufficiently in situation.
So much of what passes for conversation today is degraded. It’s either about one-upmanship, or dreary trivia. Even the cut and thrust of wit and bons mots is a form of bedazzlement designed to stop conversations dead rather than broaden them.
Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much.
You lil Fraggle Rock, beat you wit a padded lock
Why buy good luggage? You only use it when you travel.
Wit is better as a seasoning than as a whole dish by itself.
Wit implies hatred or contempt of folly and crime, produces its effects by brisk shocks of surprise, uses the whip of scorpions and the branding-iron, stabs, stings, pinches, tortures, goads, teases, corrodes, undermines.
I think the average Jew is probably sharper intellectually than the average gentile, because for years and years he’s had to live by his wits. Consequently, there has evolved a race of Jews who are more agile mentally than the rest of us.
A witty saying proves nothing.
I think Hamlet is a very funny play – Hamlet is riddled with wit.
If he had his wits about him Bunny would surely keep his mouth shut; but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.
Folks with their wits about them knew that advertisements were just a pack of lies – you had only to look at the claims of patent medicines!
The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.
Drunkenness is the very sepulcher
Of man’s wit and his discretion.
Of man’s wit and his discretion.
A man often runs the risk of throwing away a witticism if he admits that it is his own.
Rollin wit a posse full of paranoid drugdealaz!
Women ought not to know their own wit, because they will still be showing it, and so spoil it.
Few authors are so interesting as their work – they generally reserve their wit or trenchant sarcasm for their books.
For all of us, self-briefing before going out or starting a project sharpens artistic wit.
Different identity groups hold specific levels of power over others when their battles play out in the media. To wit: Black beats white. Gay beats white. Black beats gay.
As every inquiry which regards religion is of the utmost importance, there are two questions in particular which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning it origin in human nature.
The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.
I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits are stored.
And though I might have learnt more wit and advanced my understanding by living in a Court, yet being dull, fearful and bashful, I neither heeded what was said or practised, but just what belonged to my loyal duty and my own honest reputation.
Coffee falls into the stomach… ideas begin to move, things remembered arrive at full gallop… the shafts of wit start up like sharp-shooters, similes arise, the paper is covered with ink…
Wit is a dangerous talent in friendship.
Sense is our helmet, wit is but the plume; The plume exposes, ’tis our helmet saves. Sense is the diamond, weighty, solid, sound; When cut by wit, it casts a brighter beam; Yet, wit apart, it is a diamond still.
Wit does not take the place of knowledge.
There still remains to mortify a wit The many-headed monster of the pit.
One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.
The essay must be artistically rendered: You must keep the reader engaged, whether with wit, conflict, mischief, and/or yes, with honesty.
There’s many a man hath more hair than wit.
Potluck Supper with Meeting to FollowВ is a marvel, deftly examining the connections between art and everyday life. Andy Sturdevant’s lively, unique inquiries into trust fund kids, co-opted flags, gubernatorial portraits, art in second-tier cities, and Upper Midwestern esoterica, brim with both wit and humor.
It is having in some measure a sort of wit to know how to use the wit of others.
One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.
For the qualities of sheer wit and humor, Swift had no superior, ancient or modern.
Authors are partial to their wit, ’tis true, But are not critics to their judgment, too?
Your highest female grace is silence.
If I believe in something, I will fight for it, with all I have. But I do not demand all or nothing. I would rather get something than nothing.
Do not think that your Learning and Genius, your Wit or Sprightliness, are welcome everywhere. I was once told that my Company was disagreeable because I appeared so uncommonly happy.
Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part about you blasted with antiquity?
Buttressed by an acceptance of female wisdom in the sacred sphere from the beginnings of organised religion 12,000 years ago to late antiquity and beyond, key women used wit and the power of the word to change the world around them.
This world is a vaporous jest at best, Tossed off by the gods in laughter, And a cruel attempt at wit were it, If nothing better came after.
At the best, sarcasms, bitter irony, scathing wit, are a sort of swordplay of the mind. You pink your adversary, and he is forthwith dead; and then you deserve to be hung for it.
Nature and society are so replete with startling contrasts that wit often consists in the mere statement and comparison of facts, as when Hume says that the ancient Muscovites wedded their wives with a whip instead of a ring.
The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence
Good similes depend upon close observation. They depend upon brevity and wit….They have to fit in context.
A whetstone is no carving instrument, And yet it maketh sharp the carving tool; And if you see my efforts wrongly spent, Eschew that course and learn out of my school; For thus the wise may profit by the fool, And edge his wit, and grow more keen and wary, For wisdom shines opposed to its contrary.
When does the mind put forth its powers? when are the stores of memory unlocked? when does wit ‘flash from fluent lips?’ — when but after a good dinner? Who will deny its influence on the affections? Half our friends are born of turbots and truffles.
Wit is a pleasure-giving thing, largely because it eludes reason; but in the apprehension of an absurdity through the working of the comic spirit there is a foundation of reason, and an impetus to human companionship.
The finest wits have their sediment.
If faith itself has different dresses worn, What wonder modes in wit should take their turn?
Men of humor are always in some degree men of genius; wits are rarely so, although a man of genius may, amongst other gifts, possess wit, as Shakespeare.
So that the life of a writer, whatever he might fancy to the contrary, was not so much a state of composition, as a state of warfare; and his probation in it, precisely that of any other man militant upon earth,–both depending alike, not half so much upon the degrees of his WIT–as his RESISTANCE.
Nothing can atone for the lack of modesty; without which beauty is ungraceful and wit detestable.
If you are going to try and change things, you had better have your wits about you.
My first job out of law school was on the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, where Gorsuch is a judge. I observed in the year that I worked at the court what many litigants and commentators have since noted: that Gorsuch possesses an incisive legal mind, writes with skill and wit, and is scrupulously fair.
Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference.
It is only a novel… or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language
You have on hand those things that you need if you have but the wit and wisdom to use them.
Many would live by their Wits, but break for want of Stock.
What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul.
I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.
He who brings ridicule to bear against truth finds in his hand a blade without a hilt. The most sparkling and pointed flame of wit flickers and expires against the incombustible walls of her sanctuary.
It is a great misfortune neither to have enough wit to talk well nor enough judgment to be silent.
The younger brother hath the more wit.
I was gearing up for it. I took some singing lessons. And I opened my mouth, and Atom promptly said, ‘That’s not going to happen. We love your voice, but maybe we could use some of your English wit.’ He had doubts about it from way back. For starters, we weren’t going to be doing the Italian-American crooning thing.
Englands genius filled all measureOf heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,Gave to the mind its emperor,And life was larger than before:Nor sequent centuries could hitOrbit and sum of Shakespeares wit. The men who lived with him becamePoets, for the air was fame.
A hard core life I toast to ex flaw, therefore I live raw and went to war wit the law.
My ideal guy is my future husband. Not sure who he is yet, but he’s out there. What impresses me in a gay guy? A warm smile, stubble, easy to talk to, thoughtful tattoos, kind eyes, wit, positivity, wanderlust, ambition, and a cute ass.
To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.
Memory is the friend of wit, but the treacherous ally of invention; there are many books that owe their success to two things; good memory of those who write them, and the bad memory of those who read them
Where might is mixed with wit, there is too good an accord in a government.
Much malice mingled with a little wit Perhaps may censure this mysterious writ.
sloughing my skin / escaping it’s grip / stripped of my wit / it hurts to be me .
My wit is more polished than your mustache. The truth which I speak strikes more sparks from men’s hearts than your spurs do from the cobblestones.
VITUPERATION, n. Saite, as understood by dunces and all such as suffer from an impediment in their wit.
Reason leavened with a little wit (if possible) is the real alternative to hate speech, meaning that there’s no better time for it.
Kamby Bolongo Mean River is an original and fearless fiction. It bears genetic traces of Beckett and Stein, but Robert Lopez’s powerful cadences and bleak, joyful wit are all his own.
People who can’t rely on their wits and intelligence to reach success — that’s not what government is about, and that’s not what I want.
The character of false wit is that of appearing to depend only upon reason.
Someone would have to keep his wits, and he had assumed automatically that since Fezzik had so few, he would find retaining them not all that difficult.
Every man depends on the quantity of sense, wit, or good manners he brings into society for the reception he meets with in it.
A book full of brilliance imparts some of it even to its opponents.
Necessity can sharpen the wits even of children.
Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence, and fills up all the mighty void of sense.
The dullness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits.
[On a dull party:] It was a fГЄte worse than death.
In the Ferrari or Jaguar, switchin’ four lanes
Wit’ the top down screaming out money ain’t a thang
Wit’ the top down screaming out money ain’t a thang
At most, the greatest persons are but great wens, and excrescences; men of wit and delightful conversation, but as morals for ornament, except they be so incorporated into the body of the world that they contribute something to the sustentation of the whole.
Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.
Brian Turner has given us not so much a memoir as a mediation, rendered with grace and wit and wisdom. If you want to know what modern soldiers see when they look at their world, read this book.
A little wit and a great deal of ill-nature will furnish a man for satire; but the greatest instance of wit is to commend well.
A writer’s voice is not character alone, it is not style alone; it is far more. A writer’s voice line the stroke of an artist’s brush- is the thumbprint of her whole person- her idea, wit, humor, passions, rhythms.
Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.
A wit should no more be sincere, than a woman constant; one argues a decay of parts, as to other of beauty.
Alan Ginsberg was fabulous. The man is so filled with energy. He’s 65 years old and he’s just loaded with energy and charm and wit and his mind is constantly racing.
You can make a sordid thing sound like a brilliant drawing-room comedy. Probably a fear we have of facing up to the real issues. Could you say we were guilty of Noel Cowardice?
One of the attractions of translating ‘Heroes’ is that it’s not the kind of play that I write. If it had been, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to translate it. There are no one-liners. It’s much more a truthful comedy than a play of dazzling wit.
Kyria Abrahams, former teen bride of a doomsday cult and seeker of salvation in slam poetry, tells the terribly funny story of her improbable life with candor, wit, and an unsparing eye for the perfect detail. Brilliant.
In the language of politics, there is only one translation for the phrase ‘hope and change,’ to wit: ‘big, fat government.’
Stuart Rojstaczer writes with enormous wit, style and empathy, and The Mathematician’s Shiva is a big-hearted, rollickingly funny novel that’s impossible to put down. A tremendous debut.
Wit penetrates; humor envelops. Wit is a function of verbal intelligence; humor is imagination operating on good nature.
‘Tis never for their wisdom that one loves the wisest, or for their wit that one loves the wittiest; ’tis for benevolence, and virtue, and honest fondness, one loves people…
Humans are an infant species, a mere 150,000 years old. But, armed with a massive brain, we’ve not only survived, we’ve used our wits to adapt to and flourish in habitats as varied as deserts, Arctic tundra, tropical rainforests, wetlands and high mountain ranges.
Let each man have the wit to go his own way.
You know, Gilan, sarcasm isn’t the lowest form of wit. It’s not even wit at all.” -Halt
[On Thomas Seymour’s death:] This day died a man of much wit and very little judgment.
I’m sure I’m very difficult to live with because of my make-up and personality.
Before we do, I suggest you take a break. If you need to go to the bathroom, this is a good time. If you’re sleepy, go to bed and save the next chapter for tomorrow. For the magician’s story, you must have all your wits about you. No wandering minds allowed.
When doing family entertainment, you don’t actually worry about kids. You know what you can’t do. But in terms of sensibility and sophistication and wit and ambition, aim for your own taste level, and kids will – if they’re interested in the subject matter – be glad that you did.
The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people – that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.
If you do not know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere
It is by vivacity and wit that man shines in company; but trite jokes and loud laughter reduce him to a buffoon.
Fine wits destroy themselves with their own plots, in meddling with great affairs of state.
Wit: a whim followed by a wham.
My dad’s sense of humor was direct and sometimes surreal – his quick wit is well known amongst our family and friends. He raised me on Spike Jones records and W.C. Fields movies, and his sense of humor fell somewhere in between.
My philosophy has always been that benefits should percolate up rather than trickle down.
Good-humor will even go so far as often to supply the lack of wit.
The history of imitation of the older literature, particularly abroad, has among other advantages this one, that the important concepts of unintentional parody and passive wit can be deduced from it most easily and comprehensively.
The more wit the less courage.
I love watching action films, and especially the little moments of wit and humor in the choreography in a lot of them. The editing of an action sequence often has great moments of comic timing.
Whom drink made wits, though nature made them fools.
As we celebrate President Reagan’s remarkable career and historic legacy, we also celebrate a man of strong character, deep conviction, unforgettable charm, and wonderful wit.
Beauty, wit,
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating time.
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating time.
Love must kiss that mortal’s eyesWho hopes to see fair Arcady.No gold can buy you entrance there;But beggared Love may go all bare-No wisdom won with weariness;But Love goes in with Folly’s dress-No fame that wit could ever win;But only Love may lead Love in.
You beat your Pate, and fancy Wit will come: Knock as you please, there’s no body at home.
Confidence in conversation has a greater share than wit.
If you put on an Oscar Wilde [play], it will interest those who are interested in Oscar Wilde. But it won’t interest anybody else, because they won’t get that wit.
In cheerful souls there is no wit. Wit shows a disturbance of the equipoise.
Poetry is the honey of all flowers, the quintessence of all sciences, the marrow of wit, and the very phrase of angels.
Wit will shine Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.
The dogs in our lives, the dogs we come to love and who (we fervently believe) love us in return, offer more than fidelity, consolation, and companionship. They offer comedy, irony, wit, and a wealth of anecdotes, the “shaggy dog stories” and “stupid pet tricks” that are commonplace pleasures of life.
For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly.
Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one’s wit at the expense of one’s better nature.
Evidently, quality of wits is more important than quantity.
Idleness of the mind is much worse than that of the body: wit, without employment, is a disease – the rust of the soul, a plague, a hell itself.
The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.
Wit is a thing capable of proof.
A wit should be no more sincere than a woman constant.
The Great slight the men of wit, who have nothing but wit; the men of wit despise the Great, who have nothing but greatness; the good man pities them both, if with greatness or wit they have not virtue.
Silence is one great art of conversation. He is not a fool who knows when to hold his tongue; and a person may gain credit for sense, eloquence, wit, who merely says nothing to lessen the opinion which others have of these qualities in themselves.
I have read my books by many lights, hoarding their beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book, nor a place to read. I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn.
Solving wits and puzzles, in a way, helps to develop wit and ingenuity.
That which we call wit consists much in quickness and tricks, and is so full of lightness that it seldom goes with judgment and solidity; but when they do meet, it is commonly in an honest man.
It would never do for me to lose my wits in the presence of a man who had none too many of his own.
A good old man, sir. He will be talking. As they say, when the age is in, the wit is out.
A woman of haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man.
I like a very dry wit, not the big kind of humor like Robin Williams. I don’t think I’m capable of that.
There’s many a man has more hair than wit.
Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
No matter how much restriction civilization imposes on the individual, he nevertheless finds some way to circumvent it. Wit is the best safety valve modern man has evolved; the more civilization, the more repression, the more need there is for wit.”.
A shepherd, in whom the spirit of God works, is more highly esteemed before God than the wisest and most potent in self-wit, without the divine dominion.
For those whose wit becomes the mother of villainy, those it educates to be evil in all things.
I shall endeavor to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality.
True wit never made us laugh.
Indeed, so far from being humorous, the male American is the most abnormally serious creature who ever existed.. It is only fair to admit that he can exaggerate, but even his exaggeration has a rational basis. It is not founded on wit or fancy; it does not spring from any poetic imagination.
We are always more disposed to laugh at nonsense than at genuine wit; because the nonsense is more agreeable to us, being more comfortable to our natures.
The glossary of politics is so full of euphemistic words and phrases – as in the nature of things it must be – that one would suppose politicians must sometimes strain their wits to coin them.
Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.
Deprived of the company of fools, a great wit does not seem half so clever.
A joker is near akin to a buffoon; and neither of them is the least related to wit.
Wit is the fetching of congruity out of incongruity.
For [the] quick in wit and light in manners be either seldom troubled or very soon weary, in carrying a very heavy purse.
My temper is not spoilt. I am absolutely non-homicidal. Nor do I ever attack unless I have been attacked first, and then Heaven have mercy upon the attacker, because I don’t! I just sharpen my wits on a wooden head as a cat sharpens its claws on the wood legs of a table.
There is naught a man or woman can not learn who hath the wit.
The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense, the third good humor, and the fourth wit.
I particularly like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. Both writers have wit and imagination and the breadth of stories they tell coupled with extraordinary artwork make for fascinating reading.
I was at my wit’s end trying to solve the world’s problems. I was frustrated that I could do very little. That frustration took me to Vipassana.
There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike – information and wit.
I like men with quick wit, good conversation and a great sense of humour. I love banter. I want a man to like me for me – I want him to be authentic.
Genuine wit implies no small amount of wisdom and culture.
The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen
As is the razor’s edge invisible.
As is the razor’s edge invisible.
Just because you’re unemployed doesn’t mean you’re not doing anything useful. You are, for example, at least keeping your mother-in-law’s wit sharp.
Foolish jokers are thick on the ground, and it rains insects of that sort everywhere. A good joker is a rarity; even a man who is such by nature finds it hard to sustain the part for long; it seldom happens that the man who makes us laugh wins our esteem.
Is it really beyond our wits to devise some form of censorship which would trap only the crudely sadistic?
Some grief shows much of love, But much of grief shows still some want of wit.
I enjoy darker sardonic wit more than knock-knock jokes. I spent the first healthy chunk of my career playing all-American, pleasant, average, nice people, so it’s fun to have some complications there.
In Paris, you learn wit, in London you learn to crush your social rivals, and in Florence you learn poise.
If you have wit, use it to please and not to hurt: you may shine like the sun in the temperate zones without scorching.
When we seek after wit, we discover only foolishness.
A cheerful temper, joined with innocence will make beauty attractive, knowledge delightful, and wit good-natured.
To find a young fellow that is neither a wit in his own eye, nor a fool in the eye of the world, is a very hard task.
On peut dire que son esprit brille aux dГ©pens de sa mГ©moire (One may say that his wit shines by the help of his memory).
Because if you’ve got the wit, you can make anything into a melody, ultimately.
Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it.
The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.
Being president is like running a cemetery: you’ve got a lot of people under you and nobody’s listening.
We prefer a person with vivacity and high spirits, though bordering upon insolence, to the timid and pusillanimous; we are fonder of wit joined to malice than of dullness without it.
A single glass of champagne imparts a feeling of exhilaration. The nerves are braced; the imagination is stirred, the wits become more nimble.
When you have wit of your own, it’s a pleasure to credit other people for theirs.
Wit has its place in debate; in controversy it is a legitimate weapon, offensive and defensive.
No one is satisfied with his position, but every one is satisfied with his wit
All my shows are therapy, trying to navigate interesting subjects so I can work them out and to be honest and say some things are beyond the wit of this man.
The things which … are esteemed as the greatest good of all … can be reduced to these three headings, to wit : Riches, Fame, and Pleasure. With these three the mind is so engrossed that it cannot scarcely think of any other good.
You can always debate about what you should have done. The question is what are you going to do?
I’m the best now Anybody wit some money should invest now
If you have any helpful suggestions I’d be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.
Education always continues. We all know that beauty fades, but what stays is a person’s personality, their sense of humor, their wit, what they’re interested in. That’s what really shines.
The whole [Scotch] nation hitherto has been void of wit and humour, and even incapable of relishing it.
My coping mechanism with my dyslexia is to use wit and humor.
My father had extravagant notions of my beauty, grace, wit, and charm.
