Wit Quotes

• Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.

  Aristotle

  Humor, Examination, Tests

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• When you set about your composing, it may be necessary for your ease, and better distillation of wit, to put on your worst clothes, and the worse the better; for an author, like a limbeck, will yield the better for having a rag about him: besides that, I have observed a gardener cut the outward rind of a tree (which is the surtout of it) to make it bear well; and this is a natural account of the usual poverty of poets, and is an argument why wits, of all men living, ought to be ill clad.

  Jonathan Swift

  Cutting, Men, Clothes

  Jonathan Swift (1812). “The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, D.D. ...: With Notes, Historical and Critical”, p.73

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• Wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  People, Wells, Feels

  "Fool’s Talk - The Kinship of Wit and Wisdom" by Kevin Belmonte, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 24, 2015.

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• In the midst of the fountain of wit there arises something bitter, which stings in the very flowers.

  Lucretius

  Flower, Literature, Bitterness

  "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations". Book by John Bartlett, 1855.

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• Wit is the only wall between us and the dark.

  Mark Van Doren

  Wise, Wisdom, Wall

  Mark Van Doren (1939). “Collected Poems, 1922-1938”

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• I soon found that wit, like every other power, has its boundaries; that its success depends upon the aptitude of others to receive impressions; and that as some bodies, indissoluble by heat, can set the furnace and crucible at defiance, there are min

  Samuel Johnson

  Crucible, Body, Limits

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• They have a plentiful lack of wit.

  William Shakespeare

  Sassy, Spirit, Plentiful

  'Hamlet' (1601) act 2, sc. 2, l. [201]

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• What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Book, Beer, Soul

  'Epigram' (1802)

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• But methings wit is more necessary than beauty; and I think no young woman ugly that has it, and no handsome woman agreeable without it

  William Wycherley

  Beauty, Thinking, Ugly

  1675 The Country Wife, act 1, sc.1.

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• Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Appreciation, Time, Class

  Henry David Thoreau (2009). “Walden”, p.210, Cosimo, Inc.

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• His fine wit Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Knives, Losing, Lost

  'Letter to Maria Gisborne' (1820) l. 240 (on Thomas Love Peacock)

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• I have no more pleasure in hearing a man attempting wit and failing, than in seeing a man trying to leap over a ditch and tumbling into it

  Samuel Johnson

  Men, Trying, Tumbling

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson (1799). “Boswell's Life of Johnson: Including Boswell's Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides, and Johnson's Diary of A Journey Into North Wales”, p.525

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• When the age is in, the wit is out

  William Shakespeare

  Age

  'Much Ado About Nothing' (1598-9) act 3, sc. 5, l. [36]

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• You can make a sordid thing sound like a brilliant drawing-room comedy. Probably a fear we have of facing up to the real issues. Could you say we were guilty of Noel Cowardice?

  Peter De Vries

  Real, Issues, Drawing

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• Competition is what keeps me playing the psychological warfare of matching skill against skill and wit against wit.

  Lou Brock

  Skills, Competition, Warfare

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• Wit is an intermittent fountain; kindness is a perennial spring.

  Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

  Kindness, Spring, Fountain

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• What is perfectly true is perfectly witty.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Witty

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• Belief in form, but disbelief in content - that's what makes an aphorism charming.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Belief, Charming, Aphorism

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• A man often runs the risk of throwing away a witticism if he admits that it is his own.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Running, Men, Risk

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• Wit is cultured insolence.

  Aristotle

  Humor, Insolence

  Aristotle (1959). “Aristotle, with an English Translation: The "Art" of Rhetoric”

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• Few influential people involved with the Internet claim that it is a good in and of itself. It is a powerful tool for solving social problems, just as it is a tool for making money, finding lost relatives, receiving medical advice, or, come to that, trading instructions for making bombs.

  Esther Dyson

  Powerful, People, Advice

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• Antithesis may be the blossom of wit, but it will never arrive at maturity unless sound sense be the trunk and truth the root.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Maturity, Roots, Style

  Charles Caleb Colton (1824). “Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think”, p.164

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• For wit and judgment often are at strife, Though meant each other's aid, like man and wife.

  Alexander Pope

  Men, Wife, Aids

  Alexander Pope (1848). “The Select Works of Alexander Pope: With the Life and Portrait of the Author”, p.54

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• Wit is the most rascally, contemptible, beggarly thing on the face of the earth.

  Colley Cibber

  Earth, Faces

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• It may be said that his wit shines at the expense of his memory.

  Alain-Rene Lesage

  Memories, Shining, May

  Alain-Rene Lesage (2011). “The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane”, p.263, The Floating Press

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