Top 100 To Wit Quotes
#1. In the context of fiercely monolingual dominant cultures like that of the United States, code-switching lays claim to a form of cultural power: the power to own but not be owned by the dominant language...Code-switching is a rich source of wit, humour, puns, word play, and games of rhythm and rhyme.
Mary Louise Pratt
#2. Mass communication
wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued
presents us wit a serious daner, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. (p. 73)
Rollo May
#3. If you have to explain your sense of humor, then you are performing for the wrong crowd.
Shannon L. Alder
#4. This is the body's nurse; but since man's wit
Found the art of cookery, to delight his sense,
More bodies are consumed and kill'd with it
Than with the sword, famine, or pestilence.
John Davies Of Hereford
#5. He committed suicide in 1794 because the Revolutionary authorities had made it clear that they planned to reward his irreverent wit with a visit to the guillotine.
Clive James
#6. You'll pardon me," said Beatrice, "if I fail to appreciate sarcasm and all the other brilliant nuances of your no doubt famous wit, Mr. Constant[ ... ]
Kurt Vonnegut
#7. You want me to invite him to dinner."
"I want you to invite him to dinner," she agreed.
"You know," he said, "most gay men don't have mothers who are this enthusiastic about their love lives."
"That's probably true," she said. "You're one of the lucky ones.
Matthew Haldeman-Time
#8. Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.
William Hazlitt
#9. I did not want to appear before the world as pathetic, deprssed, and psychologically ill. So I erected a barrier of words and wit around myself, so that nobody could see how needy I really was.
Karen Armstrong
#10. What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took every opportunity presented to us to assault the weak?
Charles Frazier
#12. If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonable experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations.
Henry David Thoreau
#13. Unhappy is that Grandeur which makes us too great to be good; and that Wit which sets us at a distance from true Wisdom.
Mary Astell
#14. It was rather too late in the day to set about being simple-minded and ignorant.
Jane Austen
#15. We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, so we buy ice cream.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#16. It's just that none of us had the wit or talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which much messier, and more time consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle.
Nick Hornby
#17. This is the time to remember that I'm the protagonist in my own story, facing every challenge with grace and wit.
Maya Van Wagenen
#18. Lewis had developed a trademark style, slow enough for note taking, loud enough to rouse the dullest listener, straightforward, abundantly furnished with quotations, and lavish in wit.
Philip Zaleski
#19. A cabaret song has got to be written - for the middle voice, ideally - because you've got to hear the wit of the words. And a cabaret song gives the singer room to act, more even than an opera singer.
James Fenton
#20. It takes a hell of a lot for a man to put up with me. I can be a handful.
Michael Jordan
#21. Is it not reasonable to suspect that if existence were pointless and the universe devoid of meaning, we would never have achieved not only the ability to imagine otherwise, but even the ability to entertain this very thought - to wit, that existence is pointless and the universe devoid of meaning.
Leszek Kolakowski
#22. 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.
Paul McCartney
#23. I'd like to introduce a man with a lot of charm, talent, and wit. Unfortunately, he couldn't be here tonight, so instead ...
Melvin Helitzer
#25. In retrospect, I am very nearly as sharp as I pretend to be.
Lyndsay Faye
#26. The only way therefore to try a Piece of Wit, is to translate it into a different Language: If it bears the Test you may pronounceit true; but if it vanishes in the Experiment you may conclude it to have been a Punn.
Joseph Addison
#27. And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, the element of fire is quite put out; the Sun is lost, and the earth, and no mans wit can well direct him where to look for it.
John Donne
#28. There's a very fine line between underacting and not acting at all. And not acting is what a lot of actors are guilty of. It amazes me how some of these little numbers with dreamy looks and a dead pan are getting away wit it. I'd hate to see them on stage with a dog act.
Joan Blondell
#29. Men whose wit has been mother of villainy once have learned from it to be evil in all things.
Sophocles
#30. I mean somebody with the wit and the guts to go and do and create. And, that I believe is what education is all about
Gordon Pask
#31. But it appeared that the motivation for the project was a newspaper article titled 'Research Proves Kids Need a Mom and a Dad.' Someone had written the word 'crap' in red beside the article. It was an excellent start. Scientists need to cultivate a suspicious attitude to research.
Graeme Simsion
#32. Science is history arranged according to the superstition and taste of the moment. The vocabulary of scholars has no wit, no salt. These heavy tomes have no soul, they are filled with distress ...
Blaise Cendrars
#34. At wuntz? What HE do?
What HE do? Who do?
Wuntz do hoo doo? How do he do hoo doo?
Once do who do? What? What!? To wit, WHAT.
Walt Kelly
#35. I saved you," Andersen said at last, slowly but firmly, like Pat was an idiot child who had to be reminded of the basic rules of the universe. To wit: Gravity exists. Time purports to flow in a linear fashion, but it's only trying to fool us. I saved you.
Alex Gabriel
#36. I wouldn't want to put out anyone's eye with my wit.
Dannika Dark
#37. But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit - and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist - and a Catholic.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#38. Indeed, so far from being humorous, the male American is the most abnormally serious creature who ever existed.. It is only fair to admit that he can exaggerate, but even his exaggeration has a rational basis. It is not founded on wit or fancy; it does not spring from any poetic imagination.
Oscar Wilde
#39. Man, I've been to jail. It was hell in there, but I survived, If they put me back, I'll come out again. I'm one of the world's great survivors. I'll always survive because I've got the right combination of wit, grit and bullshit.
Don King
#40. And so we go and I meet his parents. And it's a very strange thing meeting your girlfriend's boyfriend's parents for the first time. Part of you is angry for obvious reasons and part of you still wants to make a good impression. On a side note, they seemed in perfect health.
Mike Birbiglia
#41. Louers be war and tak gude heid about Quhome that ye lufe, for quhome ye suffer paine. I lat yow wit, thair is richt few thairout Quhome ye may traist to haue trew lufe agane.
Robert Henryson
#43. Look, this is helping me out quite a bit, but could you just get to the punishment part? We're at the end of World War Two in history, and I can't wait to find out who wins.
Rob Thomas
#44. Then the small man suddenly ran after them and said:
"I want to get my haircut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere where they cut hair properly? I keep on having my hair cut, but it keeps on growing again."
One of the tall men looked at him with the air of a pained naturalist.
G.K. Chesterton
#45. You can con God and get away with it, Granny said, if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you'll do next.
Dean Koontz
#46. A little wit and a great deal of ill-nature will furnish a man for satire; but the greatest instance of wit is to commend well.
John Tillotson
#47. Yeah, man. It's time to let de people get good herbs and smoke. Government's a joke. All dey wan' is ya smoke cigarettes and cigar. Some cigar wickeder den herb. Yeah, man, ya can't smoke cigar. Smoke herb. Some big cigar me see man wit', God bless! Me tell him must smoke herb.
Bob Marley
#48. The key to spontaneous wit is an unburdened mind.
Darwin Ortiz
#49. I envy no quality of the mind or intellect in others; not genius, power, wit, nor fancy; but, if I could choose what would be most delightful, and, I believe, most useful to me, I should prefer a firm religious belief to every other blessing.
Humphry Davy
#50. Lust is an enemy to the purse, a foe to the person, a canker to the mind, a corrosive to the conscience, a weakness of the wit, a besotter of the senses, and finally, a mortal bane to all the body.
Pliny The Elder
#52. There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope.
Oscar Wilde
#53. It was difficult to hold Broca's brain without wondering whether in some sense Broca was still in there - his wit, his skeptical mien, his abrupt gesticulations when he talked, his quiet and sentimental moments.
Carl Sagan
#54. In The Tricky Art of Co-Existing, Sandi Toksvig navigates life's little dilemmas with wit and not-so-common sense. You'll learn the strange history of common courtesy and the one true secret of social success: how to not drive everyone around you crazy.
William Poundstone
#55. One no more owes one's beauty to a lover than one's wit to an echo
William Congreve
#56. Things are bound to begin happening if you've got your wits about you. You create the lucky accidents.
Lewis Thomas
#57. Writings may be compared to wine. Sense is the strength, but wit the flavor.
Laurence Sterne
#58. Brian Turner has given us not so much a memoir as a mediation, rendered with grace and wit and wisdom. If you want to know what modern soldiers see when they look at their world, read this book.
Larry Heinemann
#59. To the many, witticisms not only require to be explained, like riddles, but are also like new shoes, which people require to wear many times before they get accustomed to them.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
#60. I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.
John D. MacDonald
#61. In the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money cannot buy ... to wit
the wag of a dog's tail.
Josh Billings
#62. I prefer to have a great time and to keep my wits about me.
Richard Branson
#63. I have long admired Caroline Leavitt's probing insight into people, her wit and compassion, her ability to find humor in dark situations, and conversely, her tenderness towards characters.
Dan Chaon
#64. We have ample testimony to her sense of humor; Cleopatra was a wit and a prankster. There is no cause to question how she read Herodotus's further assertion that Egypt was a country in which the women urinate standing up, the men sitting down.
Stacy Schiff
#65. All my shows are therapy, trying to navigate interesting subjects so I can work them out and to be honest and say some things are beyond the wit of this man.
Marcus Brigstocke
#66. We owe to one another all the wit and good humour we can command; and nothing so clears our mental vistas as sympathetic and intelligent conversation.
Agnes Repplier
#67. A man must keep his earnestness nimble, to escape ridicule.
D.H. Lawrence
#68. But honest instinct comes a volunteer; Sure never to o'er-shoot, but just to hit, While still too wide or short in human wit.
Alexander Pope
#69. We are deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Jonathan Hardy. The clever wit and joy he brought to his performance of Rygel was a true gift to the world of Farscape. My sincerest condolences go out to Jonathan's family and to his many fans around the world.
Brian Henson
#70. That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.
Siri Hustvedt
#71. For poetry, he's past his prime,
He takes an hour to find a rhyme;
His fire is out, his wit decayed,
His fancy sunk, his muse a jade.
I'd have him throw away his pen,
But there's no talking to some men.
Jonathan Swift
#72. Courage ought to be guided by skill, and skill armed by courage. Neither should hardiness darken wit, nor wit cool hardiness. Be valiant as men despising death, but confident as unwonted to be overcome.
Philip Sidney
#73. It takes a thorough knowledge of the English language to effectively abuse it.
Charlene Vermeulen
#74. The hapless wit has his labors always to begin, the call for novelty is never satisfied, and one jest only raises expectation of another.
Samuel Johnson
#75. No man is the wiser for his learning; it may administer matter to work in, or objects to work upon; but wit and wisdom are born with a man.
John Selden
#76. Jason smiled and took a sip of his coke before responding. I'm not sure how to reply to that. I thought about just giving you a nasty look. But I see you already have one.
Mark A. Cooper
#77. I've been so thoroughly incorporated into the California culture that I practice meditation and go to a therapist, even though I always set a trap: during my meditation I invent stories to keep from being bored, and in therapy I invent stories to keep from boring the psychologist.
Isabel Allende
#78. While overseeing tonight's dinner party, I finally found myself in the presence of Mr. Edwards's famed wit when he asked me whether I had visited the zoo to see the puffins. Somehow Miss Wyndham was the one forced to leave the house.
Tarun Shanker
#79. His skin like grey bark, his eyes pale as a winter pool, time and age had worn my father to the bone. In our youth, he'd been a strict master lording over my lessons while tender with the flower of his heart, my sister Anabine. Ana, the lovely, blooming jewel. Zyndel, she of clever wit.
Jamie Wyman
#80. Unlike some men, I had never drunk for boldness or charm or wit; I had used alcohol for precisely what it was, a depressant to check the mental exhilaration produced by extended sobriety.
Frederick Exley
#81. Nobody ever goes to that store to shop because it's too crowded.
Sol Luckman
#82. 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
#85. Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.
Robert A. Heinlein
#86. Grace Murphy, defender of the downtrodden! Snarking one villain at a time with her acerbic wit and pointy boobs! If there was going to be super-natural mojo involved in my life, the least I could ask for was non-sagging boobs.
Nicole Hamlett
#87. I have great affection for you, Roy" I answered, "but I don't think you are the sort of person I'd care to have breakfast with.
W. Somerset Maugham
#88. Take back the beauty and wit you bestow upon me; leave me my own mediocrity of agreeableness and genius, but leave me also my sincerity, my constancy, and my plain dealing; 'Tis all I have to recommend me to the esteem either of others or myself.
Mary Wortley Montagu
#89. There is hardly that person to be found who is not more concerned for the reputation of wit and sense, than honesty and virtue.
Richard Steele
#90. It was while Princess Margaret was attending a high-society party in New York that the hostess asked her politely how the Queen was keeping. "Which one?" she is reported to have replied with her typically razor-sharp wit. "My sister, my mother or my husband?
Princess Margaret
#91. Wit is the key, I think, to anybody's heart, because who doesn't like to laugh?
Julia Roberts
#92. It is a mere needless thing to fight with ignorance with all your true strength except you can educate and change ignorance with wit and wisdom
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#93. I soon found that wit, like every other power, has its boundaries; that its success depends upon the aptitude of others to receive impressions; and that as some bodies, indissoluble by heat, can set the furnace and crucible at defiance, there are min
Samuel Johnson
#94. I want to take ye to bed. In my bed. And I mean to spend the rest of the day thinking
what to do wit ye once I got ye there. So wee Archie can just go and play at marbles
with his bollucks, aye?
Diana Gabaldon
#95. Well, well," said he, "do not make yourself unhappy. If you are a good girl for the next ten years, I will take you to a review at the end of them.
Jane Austen
#96. When someone gives you advice, just ask them to give it in writing and they will either keep mum or will run from there.
Amit Kalantri
#97. There is no room for pride in any man. There is no room for unkindness. There is no room for wit at the expense of others. All men are born the same, and equal. As you saw to-day, so come the Captains and the Kings and the Tinkers and the Tailors.
Richard Llewellyn
#98. To proportion the eagerness of contest to its importance seems too hard a task for human wisdom. The pride of wit has kept ages busy in the discussion of useless questions, and the pride of power has destroyed armies, to gain or to keep unprofitable possessions.
Samuel Johnson
#99. Satan's First Law of Malignity - to wit, if the worst can happen, it usually will
Stephen King
#100. Kinda ' makes it hard to be a super hero when you ain't got nothin' to work wit', ain't it?
Randolph Randy Camp
