Wit Quotes - Page 10

• Conservatism is affluent and openhanded, but there is a cunning juggle in riches. I observe that they take somewhat for everythingthey give. I look bigger, but am less; I have more clothes, but am nit so warm; more armor, but less courage; more books, but less wit.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Book, Clothes, Giving

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.184, Library of America

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• Good similes depend upon close observation. They depend upon brevity and wit....They have to fit in context.

  James J. Kilpatrick

  Fit, Simile, Observation

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• 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.

  Spencer W. Kimball

  Girl, Integrity, Generations

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• There is going to come a day when everyone here is going to need keen observation and wit to ridicule George W. Bush. But when that day comes, all we're going to have are tired puns and goofy looks. Because as you would say, we're suffering from the soft bigotry of low expectorations.

  Jon Stewart

  Tired, Suffering, Needs

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• The glossary of politics is so full of euphemistic words and phrases - as in the nature of things it must be - that one would suppose politicians must sometimes strain their wits to coin them.

  Albert J. Nock

  Phrases, Coins, Sometimes

  "Free Speech and Plain Language". The Atlantic Monthly, January 1936.

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• The necessity for struggle is one of the clever devices through which nature forces individuals to expand, develop, progress, and become strong through resistance. . .We are forced to recognize that this great universal necessity for struggle must have a definite and useful purpose. That purpose is to force the individual to sharpen his wits, arouse his enthusiasm, build up his spirit of faith, gain definiteness of purpose, develop his power of will, and inspire his faculty of imagination to give him new uses for old ideas and concepts. . .

  Napoleon Hill

  Strong, Clever, Struggle

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• Education always continues. We all know that beauty fades, but what stays is a person's personality, their sense of humor, their wit, what they're interested in. That's what really shines.

  Stephanie Seymour

  Personality, Shining, Sense Of Humor

  Interview magazine, www.interviewmagazine.com. August 12, 2013.

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• The way to truth lies through the destruction of the false. To destroy the false, you must question your most inveterate beliefs. Of these the idea that you are the body is the worst. With the body comes the world, with the world - God, who is supposed to have created the world and thus it starts - fears, religions, prayers, sacrifices, all sorts of systems - all to protect and support the child-man, frightened out of his wits by monsters of his own making. Realize that what you are cannot be born nor die and with the fear gone, all suffering ends.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  Prayer, Children, Lying

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• Drunkenness is the very sepulcher
  Of man's wit and his discretion.

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  Men, Drunkenness, Discretion

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• 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.

  Dorothy Parker

  Distance, Sick, Unhappy

  Quoted in Paris Review, Summer 1956

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• My brother Billy was the joke teller. My brother Jim had a really sharp, cutting wit. And the teller of long stories, that was my brother Ed. As a child, I just absorbed everything they said, and I was always in competition for the laughs.

  Stephen Colbert

  Brother, Children, Cutting

  "How many Stephen Colberts are there?" by Charles McGrath, www.nytimes.com. January 4, 2012.

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• Love all. Trust a few. Do wrong to none. This above all: to thine own self be true. No legacy is so rich as honesty. Brevity is the soul of wit

  William Shakespeare

  Honesty, Self, Soul

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• I think the average Jew is probably sharper intellectually than the average gentile, because for years and years he's had to live by his wits. Consequently, there has evolved a race of Jews who are more agile mentally than the rest of us.

  George Lincoln Rockwell

  Thinking, Race, Average

  Interview with Alex Haley, Playboy, April 1966.

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• Discovery is adventure. There is an eagerness, touched at times with tenseness, as man moves ahead into the unknown. Walking the wilderness is indeed like living. The horizon drops away, bringing new sights, sounds, and smells from the earth. When one moves through the forests, his sense of discovery is quickened. Man is back in the environment from which he emerged to build factories, churches, and schools. He is primitive again, matching his wits against the earth and sky. He is free of the restraints of society and free of its safeguards too.

  William O. Douglas

  Moving, School, Adventure

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• All my shows are therapy, trying to navigate interesting subjects so I can work them out and to be honest and say some things are beyond the wit of this man.

  Marcus Brigstocke

  Men, Interesting, Trying

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• 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.

  Neil Patrick Harris

  Fun, Nice, Average

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• In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.

  Gustave Le Bon

  Mother, Stupidity, Crowds

  Gustave Le Bon (2009). “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind”, p.33, The Floating Press

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• In a theatre it happened that a fire started off stage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Thinking, Fire, Theatre

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• I write. I have read a great deal. I enjoy books. I like the wit of languages. Even French I like. I like to be able to think in different modes. I like to be able to use the language a great deal and carry on rehearsals in French.

  Twyla Tharp

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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• I have dashed across continents and oceans as a fugitive and have matched my wits with the police and secret agents seeking to deprive me of one of the greatest blessings man can have-liberty.

  Jack Johnson

  Ocean, Men, Blessing

  Jack Johnson (1969). “Jack Johnson is a dandy: an autobiography”

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• My wits begin to turn.

  William Shakespeare

  Madness, Turns

  William Shakespeare, Jay L. Halio (1992). “The Tragedy of King Lear”, p.178, Cambridge University Press

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• The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen
  As is the razor's edge invisible.

  William Shakespeare

  Women, Wenches, Razors

  William Shakespeare, James Boswell, Alexander Pope, George Steevens, Richard Farmer (1821). “The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare”, p.36

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• Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit;
  All with me's meet that I can fashion fit.

  William Shakespeare

  Fashion, Land, Greed

  William Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate, Eric Rasmussen (2009). “King Lear”, p.43, Palgrave Macmillan

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• Two negatives don't make a positive, any more than two half-wits make a wit.

  Neil Kinnock

  Truth, Two, Half

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• 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.

  Andre Bazin

  Photography, Lying, Men

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