Quotes About Wit

Wit is something more than a gymnastic trick of the intellect; true wit implies a beam of thought into the essence of a question, a flash that lights up a situation. Wit suggests the delicate but delightful play of a rapier in the hands of a master.

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.

I don't want to be classed as a humorist. It makes me feel guilty. I've never read a good tough quotable female humorist, and I never was one myself. I couldn't do it. A "smartcracker" they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy. There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

wit, wit! - I look upon it always as a draught of air; it cools indeed, but one gets a stiff neck from it.

A small degree of wit, accompanied by good sense, is less tiresome in the long run than a great amount of wit without it.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinction. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit. It is like ice, on which no beauty of form, no majesty of carriage, can plead any immunity; they must walk gingerly, according to the laws of ice, or down they must go, dignity and all.

The impromptu reply is precisely the touchstone of the man of wit.

If you put on an Oscar Wilde [play], it will interest those who are interested in Oscar Wilde. But it won't interest anybody else, because they won't get that wit.

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

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.

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

They have a plentiful lack of wit.

Picture perfect, I paint a perfect picture bomb the hoochies wit' precision, my intentions to get richer.

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

The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a procession.

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.

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.

Hast any philosophy in thee shepherd? .• • • • . . . He that wants money, means and content, is without three good friends; that the property of rain is to wet and fire to burn; that good pasture makes fat sheep, and a great cause of the night is lack of the sun; that he that hath learned no wit by nature nor art may complain of good breeding or comes of a very dull kindred.

We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow.

We pray for a generation of girls who will display their wit, their intelligence, their modest charm, their integrity, their loveliness rather than their bodies and their sexual possibilities.

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.

Some brains are barren grounds, that will not bring seed or fruit forth, unless they are well manured with the old wit which is raked from other writers and speakers.

Religion supposed Heaven and Hell, the word of God, and sacraments, and twenty other circumstances which, taken seriously, are a wonderful check to wit and humour.

There are certain common privileges of a writer, the benefit whereof, I hope, there will be no reason to doubt; particularly, that where I am not understood, it shall be concluded, that something very useful and profound is couched underneath; and again, that whatever word or sentence is printed in a different character, shall be judged to contain something extraordinary either or wit of sublime.

[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.

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

A cheerful temper, joined with innocence will make beauty attractive, knowledge delightful, and wit good-natured.

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.

You know, sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.' 'And yet it is still extremely funny.

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than any [constitutional] provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government.

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.

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

Both wit and understanding are trifles without integrity.

I'm sorry I stood there like a half-wit, Count Petroff," she told him matter-of-factly, "but I was a bit--surprised. After all, it's not everyday that I see a man who's prettier than I am." (Alexandra)

Wit and humor belong to genius alone.

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

I appreciate simplicity, true beauty that lasts over time, and a little wit and eclecticism that make life more fun.

It is many times with a fraudulent Design that men stick their corrupt Doctrine with the Cloves of other mens Wit.

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.

...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.

Wit lives in the present, but genius survives the future.

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.

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.

I get the impression the English kings were witty, for some reason. I feel like all you had was your wit.

I have known several persons of great fame for wisdom in public affairs and councils governed by foolish servants. I have known great ministers, distinguished for wit and learning, who preferred none but dunces. I have known men of valor cowards to their wives. I have known men of cunning perpetually cheated. I knew three ministers who would exactly compute and settle the accounts of a kingdom, wholly ignorant of their own economy.

Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.