English Wit Quotes

#1. We admire Chaucer for his sturdy English wit ... But though it is full of good sense and humanity, it is not transcendent poetry.For picturesque description of persons it is, perhaps, without a parallel in English poetry; yet it is essentially humorous, as the loftiest genius never is.

Henry David Thoreau

#2. This was the English passion, not for self-improvement or culture or wit, but for DIY, Do It Yourself, for bigger and better houses with more mod cons, the painstaking accumulation of comfort and, with it, status - the concrete display of earned cash.

Hanif Kureishi

#3. When all of earth turns against you, all of heaven turns toward you.

Max Lucado

#4. From purest wells of English undefiled None deeper drank than he, the New World's Child, Who in the language of their farm field spoke The wit and wisdom of New England folk.

John Greenleaf Whittier

#5. You can have a lot of fun with rhinos

Wilkie Martin

#6. Miss Austen's novels ... seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer ... is marriageableness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#7. In this world, it is not worth finding anyone's faults. One becomes bound (by karma) by finding faults.

Dada Bhagwan

#8. At present, the novels which we owe to English ladies form no small part of the literary glory of our country. No class of works is more honorably distinguished for fine observation, by grace, by delicate wit, by pure moral feeling.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#9. Guardians are necessary for children and abnormal adults, because they cannot make responsible choices for themselves.

Tom G. Palmer

#10. I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.

V.S. Naipaul

#11. Only one English word adequately describes his transformation of the islands from worthless to priceless: magical.

Kurt Vonnegut

#12. I like feeling strong. It keeps my mental floor higher.

Pink

#13. She had hauled out Grandma O'Donnell's crystal plates, the ones Gram claimed were hand-cut by our distant relatives in County Kerry during the potato famine. She also said Big Foot crashed her eighteenth birthday party.

Susan Kaye Quinn

#14. Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, innuendo, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit, but unlike the French and the English, we have not been much good at wit since the days of Benjamin Franklin.

James Thurber

#15. You don't like presents or anything new, you don't even need a card. You prefer your appreciations to be something of helpfulness, for someone else's regard.

Julie Hebert

#16. She said interruptions were simply God's appointments.

Debbie Macomber

#17. I get the impression the English kings were witty, for some reason. I feel like all you had was your wit.

Colin Quinn

#18. If water was beer I'd be a teetotaler

Benny Bellamacina

#19. If daughters couldn't soften a man, then nothing would.

Linda Weaver Clarke

#20. I suppose we all tend to want the impossible. And sometimes in attempting it we achieve something near enough to the impossible to elicit satisfaction.

Julie Anne Long

#21. It takes a thorough knowledge of the English language to effectively abuse it.

Charlene Vermeulen

#22. My mother studied English and drama at the University of Pennsylvania, where my father studied architecture. She was a great influence in all sorts of ways, a wicked wit.

Donald Barthelme