Search

Quick Access

Wit Quotes

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.
Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury
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
Gordon Pask
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
Oscar Wilde
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.
William Shakespeare
Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom.
W. Somerset Maugham
Picture perfect, I paint a perfect picture bomb the hoochies wit’ precision, my intentions to get richer.
Tupac Shakur
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.
Henry Williamson
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.
Phyllis McGinley
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?
Zicheng Hong
It doesn’t phaze, I amaze wit my phrases
Play this in your Jeep, so your neighbors lose some sleep
(I wanna thank you)
Del tha Funkee Homosapien
Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.
Agnes Repplier
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.
Graydon Carter
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.
Octavio Paz
Society develops wit, but its contemplation alone forms genius.
Madame de Stael
A poem’s life and death dependeth still
Not on the poet’s wits, but reader’s will.
Alexander Brome
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.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
I hope wit comes through in all the characters I portray.
Jane Krakowski
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.
William Shakespeare
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.”
Hubert H. Humphrey
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.
Harriet Martineau
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.
Stephen Fry
In the midst of the fountain of wit there arises something bitter, which stings in the very flowers.
Lucretius
Where judgment has wit to express it, there’s the best orator.
William Penn
Wit is a weapon. Jokes are a masculine way of inflicting superiority. But humor is the pursuit of a gentle grin, usually in solitude.
Frank Muir
Wit, like hunger, will be with great difficulty restrained from falling on vice and ignorance, where there is great plenty and variety of food.
Henry Fielding
We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, so we buy ice cream.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Kate Spade
Every habit makes our hand more witty and our wit less handy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.
Ben Okri
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.
Benjamin Franklin
Wit and woman are two frail things, and both the frailer by concurring.
Thomas Overbury
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.
Walter Scott
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.
Joan Blondell
Wit has as few true judges as painting.
William Wycherley
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
Oscar Wilde
Wit is the refractory pupil of judgment.
William Shenstone
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.
Laurence Sterne
Wit – the salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.
Ambrose Bierce
There is hardly that person to be found who is not more concerned for the reputation of wit and sense, than honesty and virtue.
Richard Steele
Converse with men makes sharp the glittering wit, but God to man doth speak in solitude.
John Stuart Blackie
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.
Christine Schutt
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.
Ouida
So is there any part of you that’s not a lethal weapon? (Kiara) No. Even my wits are sharpened. (Nykyrian)
Sherrilyn Kenyon
Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit;
All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit.
William Shakespeare
If you come to a fork in the road, take it.
Yogi Berra
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.
William Blake
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.
Mario Testino
Competition is what keeps me playing the psychological warfare of matching skill against skill and wit against wit.
Lou Brock
Seduction is about intelligence and wit. Someone who makes me laugh has every chance to seduce me.
Riccardo Tisci
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.
Brian Henson
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.
William Butler Yeats
There’s something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it’s a grandiose form of funk.
Elizabeth Bowen
Things are bound to begin happening if you’ve got your wits about you. You create the lucky accidents.
Lewis Thomas
Beauties are always curious about beauties, and wits about wits.
Maria Edgeworth
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.
Joan Lowery Nixon
Ryan Alvanos is an offbeat, insanely inventive singer-songwriter who sneaks up on you with a sly wit and subtle power.
Steve Morse
There are as many and innumerable degrees of wit, as there are cubits between this and heaven.
Michel de Montaigne
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.
Hubert H. Humphrey
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.
Michael Cunningham
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.
Jack Johnson
And wit’s the noblest frailty of the mind.
Thomas Shadwell
I have ever thought so superstitiously of wit, that I fear I have committed idolatry against wisdom.
John Lyly
Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival.
Tom Robbins
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.
Edwin Percy Whipple
He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious.
Yogi Berra
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.
Rex Stout
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.
Bob Colacello
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.
Kate Millett
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.
Lord Chesterfield
Some books we read, tho’ few there are that hit the happy point where wisdom joins with wit.
Benjamin Franklin
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.
Elihu Burritt
Wit is as infinite as love, and a deal more lasting in its qualities.
Agnes Repplier
Display advertising and the movies, though they may dull the wits, certainly stimulate the eyes.
John Dos Passos
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.
Matthew Arnold
A good wit will make use of anything.
William Shakespeare
Humor is wit and love.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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.]
Torquato Tasso
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.
Edward Young
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!
Edmund Spenser
Humor is the offspring of man; it comes forth like Minerva, fully armed from the brain.
Roger L’Estrange
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.
Richard Corliss
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.
Chris Eubank Sr.
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
William Wycherley
Where the drink goes in, there the wit goes out.
George Herbert
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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
O love, what strange and wonderful fits: one sole thing, one beauty alone, can give me life and deprive me of wits.
Gaspara Stampa
I was in them million dollar meetings, he was cheatin. All up in the church, he was sneakin wit the deacon.
Nicki Minaj
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.
Twyla Tharp
Wit is often a mask. If you tear it you will find either genius irritated or cleverness juggling.
Khalil Gibran
The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
Edward Abbey
It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none.
Denis Diderot
When one wishes to play the wit, he sometimes wander a little from the truth.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Depending upon shock tactics is easy, whereas writing a good play is difficult. Pubic hair is no substitute for wit.
J. B. Priestley
Never engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed man.
Winston Churchill
Yet writers say, as in the sweetest bud
The eating canter dwells, so eating love
Inhabits in the finest wits of all.
William Shakespeare
Wit must be foiled by wit: cut a diamond with a diamond.
William Congreve
Wit is the lowest form of humor.
Alexander Pope
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.
Tracy Kidder
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.
Allison Pearson
[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.
Kim Campbell
I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance Huxley
Charles Darwin
People are always saying, ‘You use irony,’ and it’s like, actually, we don’t use irony: we use wit and playfulness and irreverence.
Giles Deacon
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.
Joseph Addison
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.
Oscar Wilde
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.
Hubert H. Humphrey
A perfect judge will read each word of wit with the same spirit that its author writ.
Alexander Pope
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.
Keith Barry
Equality means equality for all – no exceptions, no ‘yes, buts’, no asterisked footnotes imposing limits.
Hubert H. Humphrey
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.
Neil Patrick Harris
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.
Ovid
If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
Adrienne Rich
Wit and wisdom are born with a man.
John Selden
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.
Hannah More
The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Bertrand Russell
One should never risk a joke, even of the mildest and most unexceptional charters, except among people of culture and wit.
Jean de la Bruyere
I’m keeping my acerbic wit completely fueled.
Janice Dickinson
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.
Jonathan Swift
Fat paunches have lean pates, and dainty bits Make rich the ribs, but backrout quite the wits.
William Shakespeare
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.
W. H. Auden
Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Clayton Christensen
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?
Hubert H. Humphrey
I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.
William Shakespeare
Wine …moderately drunken it doth quicken a man’s wits, It doth comfort the heart.
Andrew Boorde
Envy’s a sharper spur than pay: No author ever spar’d a brother; Wits are gamecocks to one another.
John Gay
It takes a hell of a lot for a man to put up with me. I can be a handful.
Michael Jordan
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.
Dorothea Brande
Neatness of phrase is so closely akin to wit that it is often accepted as its substitute.
Agnes Repplier
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.
Catriona Gray
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.
William Congreve
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.
Jonathan Swift
What do we want for people? Human dignity, personal expression and fulfillment, justice, freedom.
Hubert H. Humphrey
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.
Joanna Going
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.
Audrey Hepburn
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.
Maya Angelou
The well of true wit is truth itself.
George Meredith
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.
Charles Caleb Colton
He who will lose a present good for one in expectation hath some wit, but a small store of wisdom.
Bias of Priene
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?.
Miguel de Cervantes
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.
Francis Bacon
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.
Thomas Jefferson
Wit, like the Belly, if it be not fed, Will starve the Members, and distract the Head.
Daniel Defoe
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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
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.
Lewis Carroll
Mockery is often the result of a poverty of wit.
Jean de la Bruyere
He who cannot shine by thought, seeks to bring himself into notice by a witticism.
Voltaire
Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit.
Charles Lamb
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.
Alan Turing
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.
Isaac D’Israeli
If I had to describe my sense of humor, I would say it’s contemporary wit, you know what I’m saying?
Tracy Morgan
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.
Elizabeth Montagu
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.
Yehudi Menuhin
New Year’s resolution: To refrain from saying witty, unkind things, unless they are really witty and irreparably damaging.
James Agate
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.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon
The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.
William Shakespeare
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.
Hubert H. Humphrey
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.
Awkwafina
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.
Denis Diderot
Less judgment than wit is more sail than ballast.
William Penn
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.
Norm MacDonald
I think I owe my life to cork soles.
Anthony Trollope
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.
Francis Bowes Sayre, Sr.
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.
Jack Vance
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.
Wilkie Collins
Mary Daheim writes with wit, wisdom, and a big heart. I love her books.
Carolyn Hart
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
Jacques Barzun
Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.
William Shakespeare
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.
Shirley Jackson
When newspapers are the principal vehicles of the wit and wisdom of a people, the higher graces of composition can hardly be looked for.
Frances Trollope
Moment I stop havin fun wit it, I’ll be done wit it.
Drake
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.
Lord Chesterfield
You beef wit me, I’m-a even the score equally. Take you on Jerry Springer and beat your ass legally.
Eminem
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.
Francis Bacon
Wit and wisdom differ; wit is upon the sudden turn, wisdom is bringing about ends.
John Selden
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.
Janet Morris
Heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common.
Dorothy Parker
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.
Euripides
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?
William Wycherley
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
Francis Bacon
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.
Drake
Or yet in wise old Ravenclaw, if you’ve a ready mind, Where those of wit and learning, Will always find their kind.
J. K. Rowling
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.
Callimachus
Dad was synonymous with his charm and wit and grace, and it was sort of the perfect way to go for him.
Jennifer Grant
How now, wit! Whither wander you?
William Shakespeare
Who can prove Wit to be witty when with deeper ground Dulness intuitive declares wit dull?
George Eliot
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.
George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton
I think hip-hop does a very good job of infusing comedy and humor and wit into music, a lot more than other genres.
Carrie Brownstein
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.
Joseph Addison
A proverb is the wisdom of many and the wit of one.
Lord John Russell
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!
Robert Louis Stevenson
[On being told their loquacious, domineering host was ‘outspoken’:] By whom?
Dorothy Parker
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.
Henry David Thoreau
Wit gives an edge to sense, and recommends it extremely.
William Penn
Every age has its pleasures, its style of wit, and its own ways.
Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
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.
C. S. Lewis
Giving votes in exchange for ideological support. To wit: identity politics for homosexuals.
Harry Hay
Some of the best work done to combat the Republicans has been wit and humor.
Julianna Baggott
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.
Bob Dylan
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.
William Hazlitt
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.
Tobias Smollett
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.
Thomas Willis
There is something reassuring about British-made products and their inventiveness and ingenuity, their creative spirit and eccentricity and their British wit and charm.
David Linley
Malice blunts the point of wit.
Douglas William Jerrold
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.
Alexander Pope
As wit is too hard for power in council, so power is too hard for wit in action.
William Wycherley
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.
Richard Bode
If you run after wit, you will succeed in catching folly.
Baron de Montesquieu
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.
William H. Seward
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.
Jim Ross
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.
Jonathan Swift
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.
Charles Caleb Colton
Confidence contributes more to conversation than wit.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Anyway Ri Ri what rhymes wit your name really? Money got you vacationing in Chile
Nicki Minaj
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.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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.
Lady Gregory
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.
Josh Billings
Shoulda sent a thank you note, you little hoe Now Imma wrap your coffin wit a bow
Nicki Minaj
Impropriety is the soul of wit.
W. Somerset Maugham
Men whose wit has been mother of villainy once have learned from it to be evil in all things.
Sophocles
At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.
Benjamin Franklin
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.
Joseph Addison
Wit resembles a coquette; those who the most eagerly run after it are the least favored.
Joseph Chenier
Muster your wits; stand in your own defence.
William Shakespeare
My wit is sharper then the finest mustache, and when I walk among men I make truths ring like spurs.
Edmond Rostand
I appreciate simplicity, true beauty that lasts over time, and a little wit and eclecticism that make life more fun.
Elliott Erwitt
Children are a plant substitute and we haven’t the wit to see it until too late
Jill Tweedie
True wit has a grave intention.
Mason Cooley
What’s up wit these new niggas? And why they think it all come so easy?
Drake
His jest will savour but of shallow wit, When thousands weep, more than did laugh at it.
William Shakespeare
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.
Henry Fielding
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.
Donald Barthelme
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.
William Poundstone
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.
Theodore Roosevelt
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.
Jean de la Bruyere
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.
Aristophanes
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?
Honore de Balzac
Wit may do very well for a mistress, but [I] should prefer reason for a wife.
Charles Caleb Colton
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.
Henry Fielding
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.
Jean de la Bruyere
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.
Drake
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.
Robert Motherwell
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.
Joseph Addison
When you are dealing with a child, keep all your wits about you, and sit on the floor.
Austin O’Malley
Yet here I stand poor fool what more, not one wit wiser than before.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
wit, wit! – I look upon it always as a draught of air; it cools indeed, but one gets a stiff neck from it.
Katharina Elisabeth Goethe
Humor is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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.
Elizabeth I
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.
Jeremiah Seed
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.
Oliver Goldsmith
They have a plentiful lack of wit.
William Shakespeare
Elizabeth Searle writes with intelligence, passion and wit. She’s one of the best young writers around.
Robert Boswell
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.
Alan King
Bonds and the pangs of hunger are excellent prophet doctors for the wits.
Aeschylus
I get the impression the English kings were witty, for some reason. I feel like all you had was your wit.
Colin Quinn
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.
Jane Austen
Reason is mechanical, wit chemical, and genius organic spirit.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
‘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.
Jonathan Swift
I’m so overexposed, I’m making Paris Hilton look like a recluse.
Barack Obama
Who is’t that to woman’s beauty would submit,
And yet refuse the fetters of their wit?
Aphra Behn
What Time hath scanted men in hair, he hath given them in wit.
William Shakespeare
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.
John Muir
Modest plainness sets off sprightly wit,
For works may have more with than does ’em good,
As bodies perish through excess of blood.
Alexander Pope
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.
Ray Bradbury
The Cardinal is at his wit’s end – it is true that he had not far to go.
Lord Byron
Do you need anything before I go? I want you to return my wits, I long to say.
R.L. LaFevers
Reply to wit with gravity, and to gravity with wit.
Charles Caleb Colton
Wit is absolutely sociable spirit or aphoristic genius.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets people’s attention.
Voltaire
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.
Mark Twain
He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Christian Scriver
Truth and beauty can still win battles. We need more art, more passion, more wit in defense of the Earth.
David R. Brower
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.
John D. MacDonald
Intemperate wits will spare neither friend nor foe, and make themselves the common enemies of mankind.
Roger L’Estrange
I have had to change the game to one that is a match of wits rather than brawn to give myself a fighting chance.
Todd Rogers
There are some men who are witty when they are in a bad humor, and others only when they are sad.
Joseph Joubert
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.
William Shenstone
Satire’s my weapon, but I’m too discreet To run amuck, and tilt at all I meet.
Alexander Pope
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!
William Lee Miller
What a pretty thing man is when he goes in his doublet and hose and leaves off his wit!
William Shakespeare
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.
Siri Hustvedt
Too much wit makes the world rotten.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
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.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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.
Ajay Mehta
… 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.
Maria W. Stewart
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.
Hubert H. Humphrey
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.
Sir George Savile, 8th Baronet
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)
Rollo May
Cleverness is like rouge – liberal application makes a woman look common and desperate. Wit is knowing how to apply it.
Tessa Dare
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.
Lily Tomlin
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.
Hubert H. Humphrey
[To Jean Harlow, who repeatedly mispronounced her first name:] No, no, Jean. The t is silent, as in Harlow.
Margot Asquith
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.
Virginia Woolf
The best prophet is common sense, our native wit.
Euripides
Wit lies in recognizing the resemblance among things which differ and the difference between things which are alike.
Madame de Stael
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
Samuel Johnson
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.
John Lancaster Spalding
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.”
John McCain
You don’t learn algebra with your blessed soul. Can’t you look at it with your clear simple wits?
D. H. Lawrence
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.
Gustave Flaubert
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.
Samuel Johnson
There is a lot of difference between failure and defeat. Failure is when you are defeated and neither learn nor contribute anything.
Hubert H. Humphrey
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.
Joseph Joubert
When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum.
Anthony Trollope
If she be fair and wise, fairness and wit,
The one’s for use, the other useth it.
William Shakespeare
We can look forward to four more years of wonderful, inspirational speeches full of wit, poetry, music, love and affection, plus more goddamn nonsense.
David Brinkley
Anonymity is an abused privilege, abused most by people who mistake vitriol for wisdom and cynicism for wit.
Danny Wallace
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.
Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
Both wit and understanding are trifles without integrity.
Oliver Goldsmith
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.
Stefan Zweig
He thought he was a wit, and he was half right.
Henri Arnold Seyrig
If brevity is the soul of wit then brevity and levity are the whole of it.
Michael R. Burch
Wit is the unexpected copulation of ideas.
Patrick O’Brian
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.
Jenny Diski
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.
Jean de la Bruyere
If folly disappeared, wit would starve.
Mason Cooley
You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.
Dorothy Parker
Converse with men makes sharp the glittering wit, But God to man doth speak in solitude.
John Stuart Blackie
Wisdom is better than wit, and in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.
Jane Austen
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.
Aldous Huxley
Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows not how to use it discreetly.
Michel de Montaigne
Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.
William Hazlitt
Satire is an abuse of wit. It corrects few evils.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Words may show a man’s wit but actions his meaning.
Benjamin Franklin
Your wits make others witty.
Catherine the Great
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.
Marlon Brando
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
Da Brat
I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t know the answer
Douglas Adams
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?
Princess Margaret
I’m a silly guy, I love wit and cynicism and sarcasm.
Columbus Short
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.
Voltaire
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.
Lord Chesterfield
swearing is, as I have said, learning to the ignorant, eloquence to the blockhead, vivacity to the stupid, and wit to the coxcomb.
Mary Collyer
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?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Anne Bradstreet
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.
Charles Caleb Colton
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.
Thomas Jefferson
If wits were pins, the man would be a veritable hedgehog.
Frances Hardinge
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.
James Fenton
Wit is an intermittent fountain; kindness is a perennial spring.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
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!
William Shakespeare
I wonder how anyone can have the face to condemn others when he reflects upon his own thoughts.
W. Somerset Maugham
A wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits.
Alexander Pope
To be witty is not enough. One must possess sufficient wit to avoid having too much of it.
Andre Maurois
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.
George Herbert
Our erected wit maketh us to know what perfection is.
Philip Sidney
I never have wit until I am below stairs.
[Fr., Je n’ai jamais d’esprit qu’au bas de l’escalier.]
Jean de la Bruyere
Many live by their wits but few by their wit.
Laurence J. Peter
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.
Edward C. Prescott
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.
Vince Aletti
Upon meeting, you’re judged by your clothes, upon parting you’re judged by your wits.
Leo Tolstoy
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.
Agnes Repplier
What do you do with mother love and mother wit when the babies are grown and gone away?
Joanne Greenberg
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.
Philip Sidney
It is a poor wit who lives by borrowing the words, decisions, mien, inventions and actions of others.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
[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.
Charles Kingsley
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?
Cassandra Clare
Wit can be beautiful, because it expresses and distills an idea.
Stephen Fry
The Sarajevans have a very particular world view – a mordant wit coupled with this unbearable sadness and… truckloads of guts, you know.
Geraldine Brooks
I will keep where there is wit stirring, and leave the faction of fools.
William Shakespeare
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.
William Butler Yeats
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.
Don Peppers
Wits, like drunken men with swords, are apt to draw their steel upon their best acquaintances.
Douglas William Jerrold
The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.
Omar Khayyam
The belly (i.e. necessity) is the teacher of art and the liberal bestower of wit.
Aulus Persius Flaccus
If you don’t know where you are currently standing, you’re dead.
Samuel Beckett
The life of a wit is a warfare upon earth.
Alexander Pope
Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust, Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust.
Alexander Pope
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.
Padgett Powell
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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Harriet Hosmer
For wit and judgment often are at strife, Though meant each other’s aid, like man and wife.
Alexander Pope
The true touchstone of wit is the impromptu.
Moliere
A thing well said will be wit in all languages.
John Dryden
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.
Edward Young
[On being asked in her later years if she were Tallulah:] I’m what’s left of her, dahling.
Tallulah Bankhead
It is a great misfortune not to possess sufficient wit to speak well, nor sufficient judgment to keep silent.
Jean de la Bruyere
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.
Henry David Thoreau
You have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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.
Thomas Overbury
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.
Alfred Adler
After wisdom comes wit.
Evan Esar
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.
George Berkeley
(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.
Terry Teachout
This man [Chesterfield], I thought, had been a Lord among wits; but I find he is only a wit among Lords.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Lloyd Paul Stryker
Wit is more necessary than beauty; and I think no young woman ugly that has it, and no handsome woman agreeable without it.
William Wycherley
His fine wit Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.
Cassandra Peterson
Wit is the only wall between us and the dark.
Mark Van Doren
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.
Humphry Davy
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.
Ann Reinking
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.
Arthur C. Clarke
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
Edith Wharton
I’d like to introduce a man with a lot of charm, talent, and wit. Unfortunately, he couldn’t be here tonight, so instead . . .
Melvin Helitzer
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.
Russell Crowe
We find ourselves less witty in remembering what we have said than in dreaming of what we would have said.
Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
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.
Samuel Johnson
I love not serious documentaries, too, but I love seeing people at their wits’ end, I guess.
Maria Thayer
Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Cassandra Clare
One can have a wit, but not a witless
Brandon Sanderson
A man must have a good share of wit himself to endure a great share in another.
Lord Chesterfield
Great wits, like great beauties, look upon mere esteem as a flat insipid thing; nothing less than admiration will content them.
Jeremiah Seed
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is less dishonor to hear imperfectly than to speak imperfectly. The ears are excused; the understanding is not.
Ben Jonson
I loved Winnie the Pooh, the Disney character, and I loved his wit and warmth.
Kelly Macdonald
Wealth can be created. Wit and intelligence can’t.
Nicole Williams
What a measly epitaph that would make: ‘They saw it coming, but hadn’t the wit to stop it happening.’
Sara Parkin
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.
John Stuart Mill
So have your wits about you, and do what you can and dig in, because it might not last.
Ethel Kennedy
Wine can of their wits the wise beguile, Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile
Homer
An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.
Adlai Stevenson I
I enjoy my pettiness with a dose of wit.
David Liss
What is this powerful have over my tub? Surely, I am transfixed by your firecracker charm and your suspended electrified wit.
Isabel Yosito
If you don t know where you are, a map won’t help.
Watts Humphrey
It seems with wit and good-nature, Utrum horum mavis accipe. Taste and good-nature are universally connected.
William Shenstone
The Germans wit is in his fingers.
George Herbert
Nor sequent centuries could hitOrbit and sum of Shakespeare’s wit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who would not give up wit for power and beauty?
Mason Cooley
What clever man has ever needed to commit a crime? Crime is the last resort of political half-wits.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand
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
Samuel Johnson
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.
Robert Burns
For as the body grows old, so the wits grow old and become blind towards all things alike.
Herodotus
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.
Sylvie Simmons
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
William Shakespeare
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
Oscar Wilde
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.
Jonathan Swift
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.
Harvey Mackay
Wit catches of wit, as fire of fire.
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
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.
James Branch Cabell
…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.
M.M. Kaye
There is a monsterous deal of stupid quizzing, & common-place nonsense talked, but scarcely any wit.
Jane Austen
Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Women’s beauty, like men’s wit, is generally fatal to the owners.
Lord Chesterfield
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.
George Herbert
He who doesn’t lose his wits over certain things has no wits to lose.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
A satirist, often in danger himself, has the bravery of knowing that to withhold wit’s conjecture is to endanger the species.
Penelope Gilliatt
Wit is that which has been often thought, but never before was well expressed.
Samuel Johnson
The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.
John F. Kennedy
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.
Frances Moore LappГ©
Wit lies in the likeness of things that are different, and in the difference of things that are alike.
Madame de Stael
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.’
Vincent Bugliosi
Listen carefully to what country people call mother wit. In those homely sayings are couched the collective wisdom of generations.
Maya Angelou
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.
R. Kelly
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.
David Lee Roth
As soon as somebody falls in love, all the wits seem to dribble out of the bottom of his head.
David Eddings
Wit is educated insolence.
Aristotle
Passion very often makes the wisest men fools, and very often too inspires the greatest fools with wit.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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.
Joanne Harris
The fairest blossoms of pleasantry thrive best where the sun is not strong enough to scorch, nor the soil rank enough to corrupt.
Roger L’Estrange
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.
Diana Vreeland
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!
Adolf Hitler
I hold a mouses wit not worth a leke, That hath but on hole for to sterten to.
Geoffrey Chaucer
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.
Hubert H. Humphrey
Comedy comes with a bit of sarcasm, wit and edginess.
Kiku Sharda
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.
Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
There are nine orders of angels, to wit, angels, archangels, virtues, powers, principalities, dominations, thrones, cherubim, and seraphim
Billy Graham
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.
Josh Kilmer-Purcell
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.
Alexander Pope
Irreverence is easy – what’s hard is wit.
Tom Lehrer
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.
Paul McCartney
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.
John Milton
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.
Brian Eno
You can fake intelligence, but you can’t fake wit.
Oscar Wilde
…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.
Leslie Ford
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.
Ray Bradbury
[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.
Benedict Cumberbatch
Brevity may be the soul of wit, but not when someone’s saying “I love you.
Judith Viorst
The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.
George Eliot
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.
Virender Sehwag
My dreams are who I’m racin wit but you can see I’m pacin it so that I’m always chasin it.
Drake
Unhappy is that Grandeur which makes us too great to be good; and that Wit which sets us at a distance from true Wisdom.
Mary Astell
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.
Edwin Percy Whipple
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.
Drake
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.
Libbie Block
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.
Tina Brown
[The Cretans have] more wit than words.
Plato
Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Robert Henryson
Your wit is always such a delight, Mr. Zeklos. I can barely contain myself around it.
Richelle Mead
Wine works the heart up, wakes the wit,
There is no cure ‘gainst age but it
Alexander Pope
Wit is the most rascally, contemptible, beggarly thing on the face of the earth.
Arthur Murphy
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.
Ambrose Bierce
I pity the shrimp that matches wits with you Jeeves
P. G. Wodehouse
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.
Alexander Pope
The man that walks wit crowd, will get no farther than the crowd. The man that walks alone, will reach places unknown.
Benjamin Franklin
Freedom, where are you? Who holds you back? […] The mother of wit and pleasure, Oh freedom!
Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage
Calculus is the most powerful weapon of thought yet devised by the wit of man.
Wallace B. Smith
Wit saves us from being swallowed whole by life.
Mason Cooley
I really like sardonicism and wit. I love the writing of Joy Williams and Lorrie Moore. I like Tina Fey, Amy Schumer.
Carrie Brownstein
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.
Ben Jonson
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.
Hubert H. Humphrey
It is a certain rule that wit and passion are entirely incompatible. When the affections are moved, there is no place for the imagination.
David Hume
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.
James Thurber
With little wit and ease to suit them, They whirl in narrow circling trails, Like kittens playing with their tails.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
H. L. Mencken
I’m a quick wit, straight to the point, no nonsense.
Wendy Williams
Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Belief in form, but disbelief in content – that’s what makes an aphorism charming.
Friedrich Nietzsche
They say the streets is a demon in a dress,
Wit dollar signs in her eyes and semen on her breath
Lupe Fiasco
A small degree of wit, accompanied by good sense, is less tiresome in the long run than a great amount of wit without it.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
If wit is the most sophisticated form of humor, pranks are the most juvenile.
Maureen Dowd
A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.
Yogi Berra
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.
Philip Sidney
As empty vessels make the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are the greatest blabbers
William Baldwin
Wit is a form of force that leaves the limbs at rest.
George Eliot
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.
Bruce Barton
Humor is the truth; wit is an exaggeration of the truth.
Stan Laurel
Generosity without delicacy, like wit without judgment, generally gives as much pain as pleasure.
Fanny Burney
A fool who has a flash of wit creates astonishment and scandal, like hack-horses setting out to gallop.
Nicolas Chamfort
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.
Jethro Tull
Wit is a comic’s defense weapon.
Bob Crane
One that hath wine as a chain about his wits, such a one lives no life at all.
Alcaeus
There are many wise men that have secret hearts and transparent countenances.
Francis Bacon
I think puns are not just the lowest form of wit, but the lowest form of human behavior.
John Oliver
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.
Richard Steele
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.
Frederick Exley
The commercial class has always mistrusted verbal brilliancy and wit, deeming such qualities, perhaps with some justice, frivolous and unprofitable.
Dorothy Nevill
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.
Rosie Huntington-Whiteley
A man does not please long when he has only species of wit.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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.
James Boswell
Expose foes wit my hocus pocus flows, they froze now suckas idolize my chosen blows
Tupac Shakur
He seemeth to be most ignorant that trusteth most to his wit.
Plato
Wit beyond measure is a man’s greatest treasure.
J. K. Rowling
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?
Charles Bukowski
Oh that’s what he left? Let his mama pick it up. Might back up on it, VROOM VROOM wit the pick-up truck.
Nicki Minaj
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.
Amruta Khanvilkar
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.
Blaise Cendrars
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.
Thomas Reid
There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike – information and wit
Stephen Leacock
If you spend word for word with me, I shall make your wit bankrupt.
William Shakespeare
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?
Libba Bray
He is a first-rate collector who can, upon all occasions, collect his wits.
George D. Prentice
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.
Wallace Stegner
If you don’t know where you’re going any road will do
Lewis Carroll
Imagination at wit’s end spreads its sad wings.
Samuel Beckett
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.
John Gregory
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.
Ben Hecht
Grief hath two tongues; and never woman yet
Could rule them both without ten women’s wit.
William Shakespeare
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.
Jane Austen
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.
John Greenleaf Whittier
Some people seem born with a head in which the thin partition that divides great wit from folly is wanting.
Robert Southey
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.
Murray Rothbard
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.
John Flanagan
Wit sometimes enables us to act rudely with impunity.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The more wit we have, the less satisfied we are with it.
Jean le Rond d’Alembert
[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.
Sarah Bernhardt
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.
James C Humes
There must be more malice than love in the hearts of all wits.
Benjamin Haydon
If thou hast wit and learning, add to it wisdom and modesty.
Benjamin Franklin
Economists and technologists bring the “bits”, but it requires the social scientists and humanists to bring the “wits.
Kenneth E. Boulding
Good wits jump; a word to the wise is enough.
Miguel de Cervantes
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.
Emily Post
Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.
Mark Twain
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.
Jensen Ackles
My wits begin to turn.
William Shakespeare
I never have frustrations. The reason is to wit: Of at first I don’t succeed, I quit!
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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.
David Bowie
Every witticism is an inexact thought; that which is perfectly true is imperfectly witty.
Walter Savage Landor
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.
E. F. Benson
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.
George Sand
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.
Joan Cusack
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.
Elton Gallegly
A funny person is funny only for so long, but a wit can sit down and go on being spellbinding forever.
Diana Vreeland
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.
William Habington
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.
David Hepworth
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.
Pierre Bayle
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.
William Hazlitt
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.
Sinead Burke
Most people affirm pleasure to be the good, but the finer sort of wits say it is knowledge.
Plato
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.
Stephen Colbert
Rappers are in danger
Who will use wits to be a remainder?
O.C.
Like a sprained ankle boy I aint nothin to play wit
Drake
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Oscar Wilde
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.
Mark Rylance
That’s what cricket’s all about: two batsmen pitting their wits against one another
Fred Trueman
I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.
Oscar Wilde
Those who object to wit are envious of it.
William Hazlitt
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.
Oswald Chambers
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.
John Selden
Writing, madam, is a mechanic part of wit. A gentleman should never go beyond a song or a billet.
George Etherege
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 .
Hubert H. Humphrey
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.
William Shakespeare
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.
Lord Chesterfield
There is a certain majesty in simplicity which is far above all the quaintness of wit.
Alexander Pope
It may be said that his wit shines at the expense of his memory.
Alain-Rene Lesage
For those with drive, wit, vision, ego and a masochistic outlook, there is always room.
K Callan
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.
Florence King
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.
Kyle Bradley
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.
J. R. R. Tolkien
If thy wealth waste, they wit will give but small warmth.
John Lyly
So many heads so many wits.
John Heywood
The wit, wisdom and insights of a different person are often unpalatable, weird and absurd to the senses of many ordinary people.
Anuj
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.
William Hazlitt
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.
George Meredith
Fashions smile has given wit to dullness and grace to deformity, and has brought everything into vogue, by turns, but virtue.
Charles Caleb Colton
A man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long.
Hunter S. Thompson
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.
Esther Dyson
A proverb is one man’s wit and all men’s wisdom.
Bertrand Russell
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.
Alexander Pope
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.
Mike Leigh
Nothing is so fatiguing as the life of a wit.
Hester Lynch Piozzi
Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.
George Santayana
I grow in worth, and wit, and sense, Unboding critic-pen, Or that eternal want of pence, Which vexes public men.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
…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.
Daphne du Maurier
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.
Adam Gopnik
Wit is cultured insolence.
Aristotle
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.
Bono
Digression is the soul of wit.
Ray Bradbury
I love Tom Cruise. When Penelope Cruz is through with him, I’m next.
Christina Aguilera
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.
Pliny the Elder
Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.
William Hazlitt
The wit of man has devised cruel statutes,
And nature oft permits what is by law forbid.
Ovid
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!
W. S. Gilbert
The girl that I wanna save is like a danger to my health
Try being wit somebody that wanna be somebody else.
Drake
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.
Charles Lamb
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.
Francis Bacon
You have a ready wit. Tell me when it’s ready.
Henny Youngman
The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
W. Somerset Maugham
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.
George Savile
Wit and judgment often are at strife.
Alexander Pope
All human race would be wits. And millions miss, for one that hits.
Jonathan Swift
The liveliest effusions of wit and humour are simply what the reader of a novel has a right to expect.
Howard Jacobson
Wit lives in the present, but genius survives the future.
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
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.
William Cowper
Jealousy, an eminently credulous and suspicious passion, allows fancy the greatest possible play. But it does not bestow wit, it banishes all sense.
Honore de Balzac
Man can not live by bread alone … he must have peanut butter.
Bill Cosby
So now I’m rollin’ down Rodeo wit a shotgun, These people ain’t seen a brown skin man, Since their grandparents bought one
Zack de la Rocha
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.
Robert Herrick
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.
Oscar Wilde
Witticisms are fire-arms, that make a noise and give pain.
Eugenie de Guerin
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
Drake
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.
Jane Krakowski
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.
Dan Chaon
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.
Edward Dahlberg
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.
William Shakespeare
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.
Hilaire Belloc
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.
Philip Larkin
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.’
John McCain
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.
James Salter
Wit will never make a man rich, but there are places where riches will always make a wit.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Richard Steele
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.
Dorothy Richardson
Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Wit, without wisdom, is salt without meat; and that is but a comfortless dish to set a hungry man down to.
George Horne
In comedy, the witty style wins out over every mishap of the plot.
Mason Cooley
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.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
A man has to have sensibility, wit, mystery, tolerance, and strength… Romance also helps.
Carolina Herrera
thy wit is a very bitter sweeting; it is a most sharp sauce.
William Shakespeare
Styles in wit change so.
Lillian Hellman
Simplicity, wit, and good typography.
Michael Bierut
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.
Hugo Weaving
Wit consists in knowing the resemblance of things that differ, and the difference of things that are alike.
Madame de Stael
Prithee don’t screw your wit beyond the compass of good manners.
Colley Cibber
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.
Alexander Pope
Conceit causes more conversation than wit.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
And the Prince stared at her like a man out of his wits.
C. S. Lewis
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.
Thomas Hobbes
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.
David Lehman
No charm, no humor, no wit — and a personality which can only be described as ‘icky.’ .
Conan O’Brien
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.
Philippa Perry
An epigram is the marriage of wit and wisdom; a wisecrack, their divorce.
Evan Esar
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!
Jean de la Bruyere
True melancholy breeds your perfect fine wit.
Ben Jonson
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.
Agnes Repplier
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.
Theodore Zeldin
Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much.
Oscar Wilde
You lil Fraggle Rock, beat you wit a padded lock
Nicki Minaj
Why buy good luggage? You only use it when you travel.
Yogi Berra
Wit is better as a seasoning than as a whole dish by itself.
Christian Nestell Bovee
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.
Edwin Percy Whipple
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.
George Lincoln Rockwell
A witty saying proves nothing.
Voltaire
I think Hamlet is a very funny play – Hamlet is riddled with wit.
Chukwudi Iwuji
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.
Donna Tartt
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!
Frances Parkinson Keyes
The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.
Avicenna
Drunkenness is the very sepulcher
Of man’s wit and his discretion.
Geoffrey Chaucer
A man often runs the risk of throwing away a witticism if he admits that it is his own.
Jean de la Bruyere
Rollin wit a posse full of paranoid drugdealaz!
Tupac Shakur
Women ought not to know their own wit, because they will still be showing it, and so spoil it.
John Selden
Few authors are so interesting as their work – they generally reserve their wit or trenchant sarcasm for their books.
Alec-Tweedie
For all of us, self-briefing before going out or starting a project sharpens artistic wit.
Robert Genn
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.
Andrew Breitbart
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.
David Hume
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.
H. L. Mencken
I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits are stored.
Ray Bradbury
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.
Margaret Cavendish
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…
Honore de Balzac
Wit is a dangerous talent in friendship.
Ninon de L’Enclos
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.
Edward Young
Wit does not take the place of knowledge.
Luc de Clapiers
There still remains to mortify a wit The many-headed monster of the pit.
Alexander Pope
One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.
Jane Austen
The essay must be artistically rendered: You must keep the reader engaged, whether with wit, conflict, mischief, and/or yes, with honesty.
Phillip Lopate
There’s many a man hath more hair than wit.
William Shakespeare
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.
Joe Meno
It is having in some measure a sort of wit to know how to use the wit of others.
StanisЕ‚aw I LeszczyЕ„ski
One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.
Alexander Pope
For the qualities of sheer wit and humor, Swift had no superior, ancient or modern.
Leigh Hunt
Authors are partial to their wit, ’tis true, But are not critics to their judgment, too?
Alexander Pope
Your highest female grace is silence.
Ben Jonson
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.
Hubert H. Humphrey
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.
Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
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?
William Shakespeare
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.
Bettany Hughes
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.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
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.
Edwin Percy Whipple
The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence
George Santayana
Good similes depend upon close observation. They depend upon brevity and wit….They have to fit in context.
James J. Kilpatrick
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.
Geoffrey Chaucer
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.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
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.
Agnes Repplier
The finest wits have their sediment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If faith itself has different dresses worn, What wonder modes in wit should take their turn?
Alexander Pope
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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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.
Laurence Sterne
Nothing can atone for the lack of modesty; without which beauty is ungraceful and wit detestable.
Richard Steele
If you are going to try and change things, you had better have your wits about you.
Dorothy Day
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.
Josh Hawley
Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference.
William Hazlitt
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
Jane Austen
You have on hand those things that you need if you have but the wit and wisdom to use them.
Benjamin Franklin
Many would live by their Wits, but break for want of Stock.
Benjamin Franklin
What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.
William Shakespeare
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.
Walter Savage Landor
It is a great misfortune neither to have enough wit to talk well nor enough judgment to be silent.
Jean de la Bruyere
The younger brother hath the more wit.
John Ray
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.
Colin Firth
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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A hard core life I toast to ex flaw, therefore I live raw and went to war wit the law.
Big L
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.
Tyler Oakley
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.
Tom Stoppard
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
Charles Caleb Colton
Where might is mixed with wit, there is too good an accord in a government.
Elizabeth I
Much malice mingled with a little wit Perhaps may censure this mysterious writ.
John Dryden
sloughing my skin / escaping it’s grip / stripped of my wit / it hurts to be me .
Maggie Stiefvater
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.
Edmond Rostand
VITUPERATION, n. Saite, as understood by dunces and all such as suffer from an impediment in their wit.
Ambrose Bierce
Reason leavened with a little wit (if possible) is the real alternative to hate speech, meaning that there’s no better time for it.
Walter Kirn
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.
Sam Lipsyte
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.
Christy Carlson Romano
The character of false wit is that of appearing to depend only upon reason.
Luc de Clapiers
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.
William Goldman
Every man depends on the quantity of sense, wit, or good manners he brings into society for the reception he meets with in it.
William Hazlitt
A book full of brilliance imparts some of it even to its opponents.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Necessity can sharpen the wits even of children.
Timothy Dwight V
Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence, and fills up all the mighty void of sense.
Alexander Pope
The dullness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits.
William Shakespeare
[On a dull party:] It was a fГЄte worse than death.
Barbara Stanwyck
In the Ferrari or Jaguar, switchin’ four lanes
Wit’ the top down screaming out money ain’t a thang
Jermaine Dupri
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.
John Donne
Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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.
Larry Heinemann
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.
John Tillotson
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.
Patricia Lee Gauch
Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.
Mark Twain
A wit should no more be sincere, than a woman constant; one argues a decay of parts, as to other of beauty.
William Congreve
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.
Ray Manzarek
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?
Peter De Vries
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.
Tom Stoppard
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.
Janice Erlbaum
In the language of politics, there is only one translation for the phrase ‘hope and change,’ to wit: ‘big, fat government.’
P. J. O’Rourke
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.
Molly Antopol
Wit penetrates; humor envelops. Wit is a function of verbal intelligence; humor is imagination operating on good nature.
Peggy Noonan
‘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…
Hester Lynch Piozzi
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.
David Suzuki
Let each man have the wit to go his own way.
Propertius
You know, Gilan, sarcasm isn’t the lowest form of wit. It’s not even wit at all.” -Halt
John Flanagan
[On Thomas Seymour’s death:] This day died a man of much wit and very little judgment.
Elizabeth I
I’m sure I’m very difficult to live with because of my make-up and personality.
Bob Geldof
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.
Pseudonymous Bosch
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.
Nina Jacobson
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.
James Thurber
If you do not know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere
Henry A. Kissinger
It is by vivacity and wit that man shines in company; but trite jokes and loud laughter reduce him to a buffoon.
Lord Chesterfield
Fine wits destroy themselves with their own plots, in meddling with great affairs of state.
John Selden
Wit: a whim followed by a wham.
Mason Cooley
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.
Tony Visconti
My philosophy has always been that benefits should percolate up rather than trickle down.
Hubert H. Humphrey
Good-humor will even go so far as often to supply the lack of wit.
Henry Fielding
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.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
The more wit the less courage.
Thomas Fuller
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.
Susanna Fogel
Whom drink made wits, though nature made them fools.
Charles Churchill
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.
Jim Ramstad
Beauty, wit,
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating time.
William Shakespeare
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.
Henry Cuyler Bunner
You beat your Pate, and fancy Wit will come: Knock as you please, there’s no body at home.
Alexander Pope
Confidence in conversation has a greater share than wit.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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.
John Hurt
In cheerful souls there is no wit. Wit shows a disturbance of the equipoise.
Novalis
Poetry is the honey of all flowers, the quintessence of all sciences, the marrow of wit, and the very phrase of angels.
Thomas Nashe
Wit will shine Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.
John Dryden
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.
Marjorie Garber
For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one’s wit at the expense of one’s better nature.
Montesquieu
Evidently, quality of wits is more important than quantity.
Claudius
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.
Samuel Smiles
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.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Wit is a thing capable of proof.
Agnes Repplier
A wit should be no more sincere than a woman constant.
William Congreve
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.
Jean de la Bruyere
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.
William Hazlitt
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.
Louis L’Amour
Solving wits and puzzles, in a way, helps to develop wit and ingenuity.
Shakuntala Devi
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.
King James I
It would never do for me to lose my wits in the presence of a man who had none too many of his own.
Anna Katharine Green
A good old man, sir. He will be talking. As they say, when the age is in, the wit is out.
William Shakespeare
A woman of haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man.
John Winthrop
I like a very dry wit, not the big kind of humor like Robin Williams. I don’t think I’m capable of that.
Chris Cooper
There’s many a man has more hair than wit.
William Shakespeare
Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.
Hervey Allen
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.
Omar Khayyam
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.”.
Sigmund Freud
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.
Jakob Bohme
For those whose wit becomes the mother of villainy, those it educates to be evil in all things.
Sophocles
I shall endeavor to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality.
Joseph Addison
True wit never made us laugh.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Oscar Wilde
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.
Margaret of Valois
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.
Albert J. Nock
Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.
Jean de la Bruyere
Deprived of the company of fools, a great wit does not seem half so clever.
Francois Alexandre Frederic, duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
A joker is near akin to a buffoon; and neither of them is the least related to wit.
Lord Chesterfield
Wit is the fetching of congruity out of incongruity.
Joseph Addison
For [the] quick in wit and light in manners be either seldom troubled or very soon weary, in carrying a very heavy purse.
Roger Ascham
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.
Edith Sitwell
There is naught a man or woman can not learn who hath the wit.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense, the third good humor, and the fourth wit.
William Temple
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.
Michael Ball
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.
Amala Akkineni
There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike – information and wit.
Stephen Leacock
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.
Emma Watson
Genuine wit implies no small amount of wisdom and culture.
Moses Harvey
The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen
As is the razor’s edge invisible.
William Shakespeare
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.
Marilyn vos Savant
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.
Jean de la Bruyere
Is it really beyond our wits to devise some form of censorship which would trap only the crudely sadistic?
Storm Jameson
Some grief shows much of love, But much of grief shows still some want of wit.
William Shakespeare
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.
Neil Patrick Harris
In Paris, you learn wit, in London you learn to crush your social rivals, and in Florence you learn poise.
Virgil Thomson
If you have wit, use it to please and not to hurt: you may shine like the sun in the temperate zones without scorching.
Lord Chesterfield
When we seek after wit, we discover only foolishness.
Baron de Montesquieu
A cheerful temper, joined with innocence will make beauty attractive, knowledge delightful, and wit good-natured.
Joseph Addison
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.
William Congreve
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).
Alain-Rene Lesage
Because if you’ve got the wit, you can make anything into a melody, ultimately.
Gerry Mulligan
Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it.
Germaine Greer
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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Being president is like running a cemetery: you’ve got a lot of people under you and nobody’s listening.
William J. Clinton
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.
William Hazlitt
A single glass of champagne imparts a feeling of exhilaration. The nerves are braced; the imagination is stirred, the wits become more nimble.
Winston Churchill
When you have wit of your own, it’s a pleasure to credit other people for theirs.
Criss Jami
Wit has its place in debate; in controversy it is a legitimate weapon, offensive and defensive.
Theodore Parker
No one is satisfied with his position, but every one is satisfied with his wit
Leo Tolstoy
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.
Marcus Brigstocke
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.
Baruch Spinoza
You can always debate about what you should have done. The question is what are you going to do?
Hubert H. Humphrey
I’m the best now Anybody wit some money should invest now
Nicki Minaj
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.
Iain Banks
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.
Stephanie Seymour
The whole [Scotch] nation hitherto has been void of wit and humour, and even incapable of relishing it.
Horace Walpole
My coping mechanism with my dyslexia is to use wit and humor.
Max Brooks
My father had extravagant notions of my beauty, grace, wit, and charm.
Rose Kennedy