W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Wit is an unexpected explosion of thought.”
“Wit is artificial; humor is natural. Wit is accidental; humor is inevitable. Wit is born of conscious effort; humor, of the allotted ironies of fate. Wit can be expressed only in language; humor can be developed sufficiently in situation.”
Source: Essays in Idleness
“Wit is as infinite as love, and a deal more lasting in its qualities.”
Source: Points of View
“Wit is better as a seasoning than as a whole dish by itself.”
Source: Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
“Wit is brushwood; judgment, timber; the one gives the greatest flame, the other yields the most durable heat; and both meeting make the best fire.”
“Wit is cultured insolence.”
Source: Aristotle, with an English Translation: The
“Wit is educated insolence.”
Source: The Rhetoric of Aristotle: A Translation
“Wit is its own remedy. Liberty and commerce bring it to its true standard. The only danger is the laying an embargo. The same thing happens here as in the case of trade: impositions and restrictions reduce it to a low ebb; nothing is so advantageous to it as a free port.”
“Wit is like caviar - it should be served in small portions and not spread about like marmalade.”
“Wit is not levelled so much at the muscles as at the heart; and the latter will sometimes smile when there is not a single wrinkle on the cheek.”
“Wit is often a mask. If you tear it you will find either genius irritated or cleverness juggling.”
“wit is often its own worst enemy.”
Source: Harrington. Thoughts on bores. Ormond
“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.”
Source: Lord Chesterfield's Letters
“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.”
Source: Moods of Life: Popular Psychological Studies of Affairs of Every Day
“Wit is that which has been often thought, but never before was well expressed.”
“Wit is the appearance, the external flash, of fantasy. Hence its divinity and the similarity to the wit of mysticism.”
“Wit is the clash and reconcilement of incongruities; the meeting of extremes round a corner.”
Source: Leigh Hunt's Works
“Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.”
“Wit is the fetching of congruity out of incongruity.”
“Wit is the flower of the imagination.”
“Wit is the Fruitful Womb where Thoughts conceive.”
Source: A Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of The True-born Englishman: Some Whereof Never Before Printed. Corrected and Enlarged by the Author
“Wit is the god of moments, but Genius is the god of ages.”
“Wit is the key, I think, to anybody's heart, because who doesn't like to laugh?”
“Wit is the lightning of the mind, reason the sunshine, and reflection the moonlight.”
Source: Desultory Thoughts and Reflections
“Wit is the lowest form of humor.”
“Wit is the most dangerous talent you can possess. It must be guarded with great discretion and good-nature, otherwise it will create you many enemies.”
Source: Letters on the improvement of the mind: addressed to a lady, by Mrs. Chapone. A father's legacy to his daughters, by Dr. Gregory. A mother's advice to her absent daughters, with an additional letter, on the management and education of infant children, by Lady Pennington
“Wit is the most rascally, contemptible, beggarly thing on the face of the earth.”
“Wit is the only wall between us and the dark.”
Source: Collected Poems, 1922-1938
“Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.”
Source: Characteristics: in the manner of Rochefoucault's Maxims [by W. Hazlitt].
“Wit is the refractory pupil of judgment.”
Source: Essays on men and manners; with aphorisms, criticisms, impromptus, fragments, etc
“Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.”
Source: Essays in Idleness
“Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.”
Source: Lectures on the English Comic Writers. By William Hazlitt. Third edition. Edited by his son [William Hazlitt the Younger].
“Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.”
Source: Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, Volume III: (1883-1891)
“Wit is the unexpected copulation of ideas.”
Source: Post Captain (Vol. Book 2) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)
“Wit is well-bred insolence.”
“Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference.”
Source: Lectures on the English comic writers. Lectures on the English poets
“Wit isn't a useful instrument of defense; it may make a short-run appeal, but it creates a backlash- one saw this in the Hiss case and the Oppenheimer hearings; certainly one saw it in the trial of Oscar Wilde.”
“Wit lies in recognizing the resemblance among things which differ and the difference between things which are alike.”
“Wit lies in the likeness of things that are different, and in the difference of things that are alike.”
“Wit lives in the present, but genius survives the future.”
Source: Desultory Thoughts and Reflections
“Wit loses its point when dipped in malice.”
“Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinction. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit. It is like ice, on which no beauty of form, no majesty of carriage, can plead any immunity; they must walk gingerly, according to the laws of ice, or down they must go, dignity and all.”
Source: Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VIII: Letters and Social Aims
“Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Wit may do very well for a mistress, but [I] should prefer reason for a wife.”
Source: Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think
“Wit must be foiled by wit: cut a diamond with a diamond.”
Source: The Double Dealer: A Comedy
“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.”
Source: Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
“Wit never appears to greater advantage than when it is successfully exerted to relieve from a dilemma, palliate a deficiency, or cover a retreat.”
“Wit ought to be a glorious treat like caviar; never spread it about like marmalade.”
“Wit penetrates; humor envelops. Wit is a function of verbal intelligence; humor is imagination operating on good nature.”
“Wit puts politicians at risk.”