Quotes About Wit

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.

As wit is too hard for power in council, so power is too hard for wit in action.

Wit will never make a man rich, but there are places where riches will always make a wit.

Wit must be foiled by wit: cut a diamond with a diamond.

It is having in some measure a sort of wit to know how to use the wit of others.

In England, wit is at least a profession, if not an art. everything becomes professional there, and even the rogues of that islandare pedants. So are the "wits" there too. They introduce into reality absolute freedom whose reflection lends a romantic and piquant air to wit, and thus they live wittily; hence their talent for madness. They die for their principles.

Wine makes a man better pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others. Sometimes it does. But the danger is, that while a man grows better pleased with himself, he may be growing less pleasing to others. Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has presented.

All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it. But all determinations of the understanding are not right; because they have a reference to something beyond themselves, to wit, real matter of fact; and are not always conformable to that standard.

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.

Good-humor will even go so far as often to supply the lack of wit.

Well, I can throw a mean comeback, so there's that. I will crush them on wit.

There is nothing that more betrays a base ungenerous spirit than the giving of secret stabs to a man's reputation. Lampoons and satires that are written with wit and spirit are like poisoned darts, which not only inflict a wound, but make it incurable.

It seems with wit and good-nature, Utrum horum mavis accipe. Taste and good-nature are universally connected.

Surely we have the wit and will to develop economically without despoiling the very environment we depend upon

Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year.

The good gardener knows with absolute certainty that if he does his part, if he gives the labour, the love, and every aid that his knowledge of his craft, experience of the conditions of his place, and exercise of his personal wit can work together to suggest, that so surely will God give the increase. Then with the honestly-earned success comes the consciousness of encouragement to renewed effort, and, as it were, an echo of the gracious words, 'Well done my good and faithful servant'.

During the Second War, the U.S.O. sent special issues of the principal American magazines to the Armed Forces, with the ads omitted. The men insisted on having the ads back again. Naturally. The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or newspaper. More pains and thought, more wit and art go into the making of an ad than into any prose feature of press or magazine. Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news.

Writings may be compared to wine. Sense is the strength, but wit the flavor.

Imagination at wit's end spreads its sad wings.

If the finding of Coines, Medals, Urnes, and other Monuments of famous Persons, or Towns, or Utensils, be admitted for unquestionable Proofs, that such Persons or things have, in former Times, had a being, certainly those Petrifactions may be allowed to be of equal Validity and Evidence, that there have been formerly such Vegetables or Animals. These are truly Authentick Antiquity not to be counterfeited, the Stamps, and Impressions, and Characters of Nature that are beyond the Reach and Power of Humane Wit and Invention, and are true universal Characters legible to all rational Men.

Neatness of phrase is so closely akin to wit that it is often accepted as its substitute.

We admire Chaucer for his sturdy English wit.... But though it is full of good sense and humanity, it is not transcendent poetry.For picturesque description of persons it is, perhaps, without a parallel in English poetry; yet it is essentially humorous, as the loftiest genius never is.

What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took every opportunity presented to us to assault the weak?

Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution, never distinctly and nakedly behold it. They speak of moving society, but they have no resting-place without it. They may be men of a certain experience and discrimination, and have no doubt invented ingenious and even useful systems, for which we sincerely thank them; but all their wit and usefulness lie within certain not very wide limits. They are wont to forget that the world is not governed by policy and expediency.

We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, so we buy ice cream.

Seduction is about intelligence and wit. Someone who makes me laugh has every chance to seduce me.

Mere words will not do. They must convey the color, charm, and pulse of life. They must have a private twinkle of wit in them that makes a good-natured noise like laughter through the keyhole of the reader's mind.

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.

The silliness-much of which is clearly intentional-is blended with some genuine grandeur. The Pixar touch is evident in the precision of the visual detail and in the wit and energy of Michael Giacchino's score, but the quality control that has been exercised over this project also has a curiously undermining effect. The movie eagerly sells itself as semitrashy, almost-campy fun, but it is so lavish and fussy that you can't help thinking that it wants to be taken seriously, and therefore you laugh at, rather than with, its mock sublimity.

Converse with men makes sharp the glittering wit, But God to man doth speak in solitude.

I think puns are not just the lowest form of wit, but the lowest form of human behavior.

I have wit in my work and a sense of humor, but I do not use irony in any way

Mr. Jones's book is a cleareyed examination of the British class system, and it poses this brutal question: 'How has hatred of working-class people become so socially acceptable?' His timely answers combine wit, left-wing politics and outrage.

Calculus is the most powerful weapon of thought yet devised by the wit of man.

You can fake intelligence, but you can't fake wit.

We may distinguish six kinds of terrain, to wit: (1) Accessible ground; (2) entangling ground; (3) temporising ground; (4) narrow passes; (5) precipitous heights; (6) positions at a great distance from the enemy.

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.

A proverb is one man's wit and all men's wisdom.

When the wine is in, the wit is out.

The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.

It requires enormous presence of mind or rather quickness of wit, when opening your eyes to seize hold as it were of everything in the room at exactly the same place where you had let it go on the previous evening. That is why the moment of waking up was the riskiest moment of the day. Once that was well over without deflecting you from your orbit, you could take heart of grace for the rest of the day.

A man must have a good share of wit himself to endure a great share in another.

Resounding…with wit, courage, and compassion. Skinny will speak to everyone who has ever felt invisible or unlovable.

A wise man will live as much within his wit as within his income.

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.

Good sense is at the bottom of everything: virtue, genius, wit, talent and taste.

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.

Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.