quotations about wit
Too much wit makes the world rotten.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Idylls of the King
Wit is well-bred insolence.
ARISTOTLE
Rhetoric
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
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
His wit is bright, his humour attractive, but both bear the same relation to his serious genius that the mere lambent sheet-lightning playing under the edge of the summer-cloud does to the electric death-spark hid in its womb.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
preface, Jane Eyre
Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics: in the manner of Rochefoucault's Maxims
Wit is Welcome. Timely Wit, Even More So. Show me one person who doesn't like a good laugh and I'll show you a hypocrite.
ROHAN AYYAR
"5 Brands Winning on Social Media -- And What You can Learn From Them", Business 2 Community, January 21, 2016
When the drink is in the wit is out.
SONIA SIMS
Belfast Telegraph, January 23, 2016
Wit in conversation is only a readiness of thought and a facility of expression, or (in the midwives' phrase) a quick conception, and an easy delivery.
ALEXANDER POPE
"Thoughts on Various Subjects"
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.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
I think humor is warmer, and wit is colder. Wit is judgment, whereas humor invites some sort of response.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
"In Conversation: Fran Lebowitz with Phong Bui", The Brooklyn Rail, March 4, 2014
Many, affecting wit beyond their power,
Have got to be a dear fool for an hour.
GEORGE HERBERT
The Temple
Wit is the Fruitful Womb where Thoughts conceive.
DANIEL DEFOE
A Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of The True-born Englishman
Wit, like the Belly, if it be not fed,
Will starve the Members, and distract the Head.
DANIEL DEFOE
A Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of The True-born Englishman
Have you summoned your wits from wool-gathering?
THOMAS MIDDLETON
The Family of Love
He seemeth to be most ignorant that trusteth most to his wit.
PLATO
attributed, Day's Collacon
Many would live by their Wits, but break for want of Stock.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanack, 1750
Men of superior vivacity and wit, when they take a wrong turn, are generally worse than other men: because wit, consisting in a lively representation of ideas assembled together, gives every sensible object those heightening touches, and that striking imagery, which is unknown to men of slower apprehensions: wit being to sensible objects, what light is to bodies; it does not merely show them as they are in themselves: it gives an adventitious colour, which is not a property inherent in them: it lends them beauties which are not their own.
JEREMIAH SEED
Discourses on Several Important Subjects
Truth, when witty, is the wittiest of all things.
JULIUS CHARLES HARE
Guesses at Truth
Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit.
CHARLES LAMB
"Confessions of a Drunkard", The Last Essays of Elia
There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
DOROTHY PARKER
The Paris Review, summer 1956