Top 100 Quotes About Wits
#1. Wine ... moderately drunken it doth quicken a man's wits, It doth comfort the heart.
Andrew Boorde
#2. Time is always wanting to me, and I cannot meet with a single day when I am nut hurried along, driven to by wits'-end by urgent work, business to attent do or some service to render.
George Sand
#3. I remember that he was always trying to expound to me in his broken Russian some special system of astronomy he had invented. I was told that he had once published it, but the learned world had only laughed at him. I think his wits were a little deranged.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#4. She didn't think she'd ever shown enough gratitude for the quick wits of the people she worked with, and if the evening ever ended, which it showed no signs of doing, she would rectify that. She would buy them all flowers or whisky and write a card thanking them for being so clever.
Nick Hornby
#5. All human race would be wits. And millions miss, for one that hits.
Jonathan Swift
#6. This is a favorite game, matching wits with a Raker. He is blind to the dead, to the burning villages, to the starving children. As is the Rebel. Two blind armies, able to see nothing but one another.
Glen Cook
#7. It may be," said he, "that the wisdom of little children flies higher than our heavy wits can follow.
Howard Pyle
#8. Instead of critics reviewing my movies, now what they're really doing is trying to match wits with me. Every time they review my movies, it's like they want to play chess with the mastermind and show off every reference they can find, even when half of it is all of their own making.
Quentin Tarantino
#10. My temper is not spoilt. I am absolutely non-homicidal. Nor do I ever attack unless I have been attacked first, and then Heaven have mercy upon the attacker, because I don't! I just sharpen my wits on a wooden head as a cat sharpens its claws on the wood legs of a table.
Edith Sitwell
#11. Knowing the truth about the vanishing did not lessen their opinion of Bilbo at all; for they saw that he had some wits, as well as luck and a magic ring - and all three are very useful possessions.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#13. I will not wage war against women and children! I have instructed my air force to limit their attacks to military objectives. However, if the enemy should conclude from this that he might get away with waging war in a different manner he will receive an answer that he'll be knocked out of his wits!
Adolf Hitler
#14. The wits or wills of men, their inventions or their injunctions, cannot make that to be sin which the law of God has not made to be so.
Matthew Henry
#15. Learn to write when you would rather sleep. Learn to exercise this gift of language when no conscious portion of your wits can vibrate anything but worry. Learn to write so, my son, and you can call yourself a writer.
L. Ron Hubbard
#16. Some have at first for wits, then poets passed, Turned critics next, and proved plain fools at last.
Alexander Pope
#19. Before we do, I suggest you take a break. If you need to go to the bathroom, this is a good time. If you're sleepy, go to bed and save the next chapter for tomorrow. For the magician's story, you must have all your wits about you. No wandering minds allowed.
Pseudonymous Bosch
#21. Yet writers say, as in the sweetest bud
The eating canter dwells, so eating love
Inhabits in the finest wits of all.
William Shakespeare
#22. Girls are so queer you never know what they mean. They say No when they mean Yes, and drive a man out of his wits for the fun of it.
Louisa May Alcott
#23. I had to use my wits or else I'd have been sunk - and nothings going to sink me. Everyone was always pulling at me, tugging at me, as if they wanted a piece of me. It was always, 'do this, do that,' and not just on the job but off, too. God, I've tried to stay intact, whole.
Marilyn Monroe
#25. There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.
Elizabeth Bowen
#26. God is the God of the people who are at their wits end, who are right up against it with their backs to the wall, and He delights to come to our help when we need Him most.
James Salter
#27. O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife.
Matthew Arnold
#28. There's rebellion in my marrow. We all have it. Most of us, if we've any wits about us, keep it hidden from the rest of the world. We ignore the way it calls our name when no one's around, and then every so often, it asks us to dance when it's sure no one's watching. Jensen
Winter Renshaw
#29. Mad she may be, or possessed; or maybe only scared out of her wits.
Chris Wooding
#30. If you strike upon a thought that baffles you, break off from that entanglement and try another, so shall your wits be fresh to start again.
Aristophanes
#31. I probably have a 20,000-word vocabulary. I'll match my wits with anyone on literature, science and the arts.
Mike Tyson
#32. [A]ll the ingenious men, and all the scientific men, and all the fanciful men, in the world, ... could never invent, if all their wits were boiled into one, anything so curious and so ridiculous as a lobster.
Charles Kingsley
#33. analytically; or even to defend it upon grounds of reason. The keen Dr. South expresses the common sentiment, when he remarks that "as he that denies this fundamental article of the Christian religion may lose his soul, so he that much strives to understand it may lose his wits.
Augustine Of Hippo
#34. Wine can of their wits the wise beguile, Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile
Homer
#35. I would love to have a battle of wits with you, Bison, but I doubt it would be a fair fight.'
'Shut your face.'
'Exactly my point.
Derek Landy
#36. Who was it that said a magician needs the subtlety of a Jesuit, the daring of a soldier and the wits of a thief? I believe it was meant for a insult, but it has some truth in it.
Susanna Clarke
#38. I am justice," Gregori said softly, his voice impacable in its resolve. "There can be no fight, no battle, as there can be only one outcome. Mental or physical bout, or simply a match of our wits, there can be only one end. I am justice.That is all.
Christine Feehan
#39. Evidently, quality of wits is more important than quantity.
Claudius
#41. To teach vain Wits that Science little known,
T' admire Superior Sense, and doubt their own!
Alexander Pope
#42. I loved the music, but the excesses of rock n' roll never really appealed to me at all. I couldn't see the point of getting up in front of a lot of people when you weren't in control of your wits.
Robert Palmer
#43. The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Eden Phillpotts
#44. Lord, enlighten thou our enemies. Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers: we are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom; their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength.
John Stuart Mill
#45. Bonds and the pangs of hunger are excellent prophet doctors for the wits.
Aeschylus
#46. The true Wonderland was not like that, he knew. It was as much shadow as sunlight, and its mysteries could only be unveiled when your wits were about used up and your mind close to cracking.
Clive Barker
#47. The time for witticisms is over and the time for wits beginning. If
Robert McCammon
#48. When I first got the news, I was devastated," Annie said. And then her chin tilted in a defiant gesture, as if daring him to begrudge her her fear. "Actually, I was scared out of my wits." Gabe heard the tremble in her voice, but he gave her no evidence
Sharon Sala
#49. Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.
Edward Dahlberg
#50. Good fool, help me to some light and some paper. I tell thee, I am as well in my wits as any man in Illyria.
William Shakespeare
#51. I believe in steel swords, gold coins, and man's wits. ( ... ) And I believe there once were dragons. I've seen their skulls, after all.
George R R Martin
#52. No. The moral of the story in so far as it has one is that cannibals can study logic, and that if you are going to leave the path, you better have your wits about you and know better than to trust the first scary old lady who talks to you in public.
Nick Harkaway
#54. To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can't sit still, move, or even go decently insane.
Charles Bukowski
#55. Nay, the greatest wits and poets, too, cease to live;
Homer, their prince, sleeps now in the same forgotten sleep as do the others.
[Lat., Adde repertores doctrinarum atque leporum;
Adde Heliconiadum comites; quorum unus Homerus
Sceptra potitus, eadem aliis sopitu quiete est.]
Lucretius
#56. I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.
Oscar Wilde
#57. It could have been a second, an hour, a year, a hundred millennia; all were correct. The first thing I saw when my wits returned was the utter shock in Sethian's eyes. It had been my thought that the experience was the elf's doing. His expression was telling me I couldn't have been more wrong.
Cristina Rayne
#58. I have had to change the game to one that is a match of wits rather than brawn to give myself a fighting chance.
Todd Rogers
#59. Someone would have to keep his wits, and he had assumed automatically that since Fezzik had so few, he would find retaining them not all that difficult.
William Goldman
#60. Some wits, too, like oracles, deal in ambiguities, but not with equal success; for though ambiguities are the first excellence of an imposter, they are the last of a wit.
Edward Young
#61. Subtle wits like to refresh themselves with a whiff of mild indecency.
Robertson Davies
#62. Out of economic hardship can come change - we are suddenly cast onto our wits and our talents and our resources and our strengths, as we lose all the choices we once had.
Michael Leunig
#63. I thought to myself with what means, with what deceptions, with how many varied arts, with what industry a man sharpens his wits to deceive another and through these variations the world is made more beautiful.
Francesco Vettori
#65. FURIES:
Over the beast doomed to the fire
this is the chant, scatter of wits,
frenzy and fear, hurting the heart,
song of the Furies
binding brain and blighting blood
in its stringless melody.
Aeschylus
#66. Rappers are in danger
Who will use wits to be a remainder?
O.C.
#68. Or is that the nature of lust? It's like an urge that disregards all the stuff that your brain knows you actually think.
I wonder if guys feel like this all the time. Or maybe if everyone feels like this all the time - everyone besides me - and that's why people act like such half-wits.
E. Lockhart
#69. In a real fight, there ain't no time and you've got to use your wits. If someone were threatening the life of my child, then I'd be a good fighter. If somebody just wanted to steal my wallet, well, maybe I wouldn't worry about it so much.
Hugo Weaving
#70. One that hath wine as a chain about his wits, such a one lives no life at all.
Alcaeus
#71. The daylight schooled the senses and the night-time developed the wits, stretched the imagination, sharpened fantasy, hammered home the memory and altered the whole scale of values.
Fynn
#72. Stars, spattered out through lifeless night from end to end, like jewels scattered in a dead king's grave, tease, torment my wits toward meaningful patterns that do not exist.
John Gardner
#73. We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.
Jonathan Swift
#74. Your obligation is that of active participation. You should not act as knowledge-absorbing sponges, but as whetstones on which we can all sharpen our wits
Edsger W. Dijkstra
#75. A voyage to the moon, however romantick and absurd the scheme may now appear, since the properties of air have been better understood, seemed highly probable to many of the aspiring wits in the last century
Samuel Johnson
#76. Everyone loves a flawed hero. I don't want perfect people. I want people who have a story, have been through some shit, dance to their own beat and still make i work, not the fake-arsed posh fuck-wits who look down on us slightly geeky weird-but-cool entrepreneurs.
Dan Meredith
#77. If you are going to try and change things, you had better have your wits about you.
Dorothy Day
#79. When a doubt is once received, men labour rather how to keep it a doubt still, than how to solve it; and accordingly bend their wits.
Francis Bacon
#80. I took the plug out of the chemical bath of lust that my wits were soaking in and waited for it to empty. I smoked a cigarette while I contemplated the return of reason.
John Dolan
#81. It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But a half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
Neil Gaiman
#82. CLOWN. Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness: thou shalt hold the opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits; and fear to kill a woodcock, lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam. Fare thee well.
William Shakespeare
#83. Why, of course, if the reader were smart enough, he could figure the whole thing through after just the first few pages! But in his heart Arthur knew that his readers didn't really want to win. They wanted to test their wits against the author at full pitch, and they wanted to lose. To be dazzled.
Graham Moore
#84. I mean that as all thoughts and theories were once judged by whether they tended to make a man lose his soul, so for our present purpose all modern thoughts and theories may be judged by whether they tend to make a man lose his wits.
G.K. Chesterton
#85. When an answer finally comes to me, I know I've completely lost all my wits - or as my mama used to tell my father, I have a few screws loose.
Brandy Nacole
#87. Let's just say, brat, that if the wits beneath your golden hair were any dimmer you would be not a female, but a dandelion,
Kasey Michaels
#88. I no longer believe in love," she said bitterly. "When people claim to have lost their heart, it's usually only their wits that have vanished.
Peter Prange
#89. Abomination . . ." The word escaped him in a slow breath. "And more besides," I agreed. "Now forgive me." Father Gomst found his wits at last, but still he held back. "What do you want with me, Lucifer?" A fair question. "I want to win," I said. He
Mark Lawrence
#90. When a man is at his wits' end it is not a cowardly thing to pray, it is the only way he can get in touch with Reality.
Oswald Chambers
#91. Living by your wits is always knowing where the wasps are.
Stephen King
#92. It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.
Wendell Berry
#95. Hat manufacturers once used a bright orange mercury wash to separate fur from pelts, and the common hatters who dredged around in the steamy vats, like the mad one in Alice in Wonderland, gradually lost their hair and wits.
Sam Kean
#96. 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
#97. In the ignorance that implies the impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality.
James Joyce
#98. If.
'If' always propelled my thoughts back to the present, because 'if' depended so much on keeping my wits about me. I couldn't properly sense things if I was distracted. 'If' demanded my full presence and participation in 'now.
'If', as much as it scared me, also kept me sane.
Ransom Riggs
#100. No one could match Howlin' Wolf for the singular ability to rock the house down to the foundation while simultaneously scaring its patrons out of its wits.
Cub Koda
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
