quotations about wit
How every fool can play upon a word! I think the best grace of wit will shortly turn into silence; and discourse grow commendable in none only but parrots.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
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The Merchant of Venice
Let your wit rather serve you for a buckler to defend yourself, by a handsome reply, than the sword to wound others, though with ever so facetious reproach; remembering that a word cuts deeper than a sharper weapon, and the wound it makes is longer curing.
FRANCIS OSBORNE
Advice to a Son
Wit is an unruly engine, wildly striking sometimes a friend, sometimes the engineer.
GEORGE HERBERT
The Temple: The Poetry of George Herbert
Some of the wit is clumsy and coarse. But sometimes it takes a blunt instrument to make a point.
DAVID PARKINSON
"Catfight Review", Empire Online, March 10, 2017
The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
Wit is the clash and reconcilement of incongruities, the meeting of extremes round a corner.
LEIGH HUNT
Wit and Humour, Selected from the English Poets
Your wit is as sharp as your....um. Hmm. I dunno. Whatever you have that's sharp.
LEAVEWELLENOUGHALONE
user comments posted on slashfilm, February 1, 2016
For we seldom admire the wit, when we dislike the man.
JEREMIAH SEED
Discourses on Several Important Subjects
This is that gross sort of raillery, which is so offensive in good company. And indeed there is as much difference between one sort and another, as between fair-dealing and hypocrisy; or between the genteelest wit, and the most scurrilous buffoonery. But by the freedom of conversation this illiberal kind of wit will lose its credit. For wit is its own remedy. Liberty and commerce bring it to its true standard.
ANTHONY ASHLEY COOPER, EARL OF SHAFTESBURY
Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Volume 1
We find ourselves less witty in remembering what we have said than in dreaming of what we would have said.
JEAN PETIT
attributed, Day's Collacon
Where judgment has wit to express it, there's the best orator.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
There is no quality of the mind, or of the body, that so instantaneously and irresistibly captivates, as wit. An elegant writer has observed that wit may do very well for a mistress, but that he should prefer reason for a wife. He that deserts the latter, and gives himself up entirely to the guidance of the former, will certainly fall into many pitfalls and quagmires, like him who walks by flashes of lightning, rather than the steady beams of the sun.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Wit is folly, unless a wise man has the keeping of it.
ENGLISH PROVERB
Make the doors upon a woman's wit and it will out at the casement; shut that and 'twill out at the key-hole; stop that, 'twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
As You Like It
Wit appreciates wit.
COELIUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Look, he's winding up the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Tempest
Men of superior vivacity and wit, when they take a wrong turn, are generally worse than other men: because wit, consisting in a lively representation of ideas assembled together, gives every sensible object those heightening touches, and that striking imagery, which is unknown to men of slower apprehensions: wit being to sensible objects, what light is to bodies; it does not merely show them as they are in themselves: it gives an adventitious colour, which is not a property inherent in them: it lends them beauties which are not their own.
JEREMIAH SEED
Discourses on Several Important Subjects
Don't put too fine a point to your wit for fear it should get blunted.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
The Little Gypsy
Thy wit is as quick as the greyhound's mouth; it catches.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Much Ado About Nothing