Quotes on Wit

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival.

The dullness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits.

Being president is like running a cemetery: you've got a lot of people under you and nobody's listening.

A witty woman is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power.

The rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks, love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness.

Nefertiti is lovely, but we should use our wit and will to look beyond that beautiful face to discover and to enjoy a more satisfying narrative - the story of mankind, not just of man.

Better to operate with detachment, then; better to have a way but infuse it with a little humor; best, to have no way at all but to have instead the wit constantly to make one's way anew from the materials at hand.

A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.

When we are at our wits' end for an answer, then the Holy Spirit can give us an answer. But how can He give us an answer when we are still well supplied with all sorts of answers of our own?

We turned onto the last landing. Going out with this guy, I thought, would involve a lot of silly laughter, some wit--the buzz of his whispered wisecracks in my ear. But there would be as well his willingness to reveal, or more his inability to conceal, that he had been silently rehearsing my name as he climbed the stairs behind me. There would be his willingness to bestow upon me the power to reassure him. He would trust me with his happiness.

So much of what passes for conversation today is degraded. It's either about one-upmanship, or dreary trivia. Even the cut and thrust of wit and bons mots is a form of bedazzlement designed to stop conversations dead rather than broaden them.

one thing I don’t need is any more apologies i got sorry greetin me at my front door you can keep yrs i don’t know what to do wit em they don’t open doors or bring the sun back they don’t make me happy or get a mornin paper didn’t nobody stop usin my tears to wash cars cuz a sorry.

There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

Wit is so shining a quality that everybody admires it; most people aim at it, all people fear it, and few love it unless in themselves. A man must have a good share of wit himself to endure a great share of it in another.

He drew a circle that shut me out- Heretic , rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle and took him In ! From the poem " Outwitted

I definitely did look up to John. We all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest.

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

Sometimes with the most intense pain a paralysis of sensibility occurs. The soul disintegrates--hence the deadly frost--the free power of the mind--the shattering, ceaseless wit of this kind of despair. There is no inclination for anything any more--the person is alone, like a baleful power--as he has no connection with the rest of the world he consumes himself gradually--and in accordance with his own principle he is--misanthropic and misotheos.

What woeful stuff this madrigal would be, In some starved hackney sonneteer, or me! But let a lord once own the happy lines, How the wit brightens! how the style refines!

Where might is mixed with wit, there is too good an accord in a government.