Quotes About Wit

Most of you probably didn't know that I have a new book out. Some guy put together a collection of my wit and wisdom - or, as he calls it, my accidental wit and wisdom. But I'm kind of proud that my words are already in book form.

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.

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

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!

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.

In cheerful souls there is no wit. Wit shows a disturbance of the equipoise.

Moment I stop havin fun wit it, I'll be done wit it.

What are the precise characteristics of an epigram it is not easy to define. It differs from a joke, in the fact that the wit of the latter dies in the words, and cannot therefore be conveyed in another language; while an epigram is a wit of ideas, and hence, is translatable. Like aphorisms, songs and sonnets, it is occupied with some single point, small and manageable; but whilst a song conveys a sentiment, a sonnet a poetical, and an aphorism a moral reflection, an epigram expresses a contrast.

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.

Americans just don't understand dry wit.

A rich, multi-dimensional tour of Naples, most brilliant, battered, and bewildering of cities, here fixed to the page with wit and élan. Splendid.

Lysley Tenorio is a writer of sly wit and lively invention—these are stories bursting with wonders (from monster movies and leper colonies, to faith-healers and superheroes)—but most wondrous of all is his intimate sense of character. Each story is a confession of love betrayed, told with a mournful, austere tenderness as heartbreaking as it is breathtaking.

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.

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

Authors are partial to their wit, 'tis true, But are not critics to their judgment, too?

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.

The essential factor in the transition of the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a physical process... rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays not part. The solution is not to be found in the result achieved, but in the way of achieving it.

Wit can be beautiful, because it expresses and distills an idea.

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.

'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...

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.

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.

Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.

You don't need a dead father to explain a character's sadness. And impressing yourself with wit/cleverness often feels like what it is - authorial intrusion.

Voices and movements approach loss and remembrance profoundly, making poetry of the mundane and seasoning it with wit.

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.

The thing that makes our friendships so short and changeable is that the qualities and dispositions of the soul are very hard to know, and those of the understanding and wit very easy.

I have read that there are two fears that cannot be trained out of us: the startle reaction upon hearing an unexpected noise, and vertigo. I would like to add a third, to wit, the rapid and direct approch of a known killer

Hey, have you heard that one about the difference between me, Wit, and my loutish cousin, Hilarity? No? Okay, so I walk into a bar, you see, very unassuming, and order a martini. Then the bartender, Hilarity, hauls off and squirts me in the face with a seltzer bottle, ruining my n ice new camel hair suit, dousing my monocle and my watch fob, soaking my cravat. So, do I let him have what for, and blow my top? I do not. I simply say: Sorry, I believe I said 'very dry'.

In I Praise My Destroyer, Diane Ackerman demonstrates once again her love for the specific language that rises from the juncture of self and the natural world, and her skillful use of that language. Whether she turns her attention to the act of eating an apricot 'the color of shame and dawn,' or to 'the omnipotence of light,' or to grief when 'All the greens of summer have blown apart,' her linking of unique images, her energetic wit and whimsy, her compassionate investment in life, always bring new pleasures and perceptions to the reader.

If wit is the most sophisticated form of humor, pranks are the most juvenile.

Elizabeth Searle writes with intelligence, passion and wit. She's one of the best young writers around.

Baby girl you need to stop it, all that pride and self esteem got you angry bout this girl I'm wit in all them magazines.

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.

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.

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.

My father's wit, and my mother's tongue, assist me!

I bob and weave em, hit em wit that Mayweather JAB.

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.

Irreverence is easy - whats hard is wit.

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.

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

With impeccable prose, dry wit, and uncommon wisdom, Ted Thompson brings to life one family's painful disappointments and powerful resilience. The Land of Steady Habits combines Austen's shrewd mastery of domestic economics with Updike's compassion for the melancholy commuter to make something elegant, fresh, and brilliant.

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.

O Fortune, how thy restless, wavering state has fraught with cares my troubled wit!

I like men with quick wit, good conversation and a great sense of humour. I love banter. I want a man to like me for me - I want him to be authentic.

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.

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.