Next to being witty, the best thing is being able to quote another's wit.
The next best thing to being witty one's self, is to be able to be able to quote another's wit.
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.
The most brilliant flashes of wit come from a clouded mind, as lightning leaps only from an obscure firmament.
Satire is an abuse of wit. It corrects few evils.
Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words.
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.
Wit never appears to greater advantage than when it is successfully exerted to relieve from a dilemma, palliate a deficiency, or cover a retreat.
We take life too seriously: the office of wit is to correct this tendency.
Wit is better as a seasoning than as a whole dish by itself.
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