Top 100 To Wit Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Satan's First Law of Malignity - to wit, if the worst can happen, it usually will
Stephen King
#6. Benjamin Franklin went through life an altered man because he once paid too dearly for a penny whistle. My concern springs usually from a deeper source, to wit, from having bought a whistle when I did not want one.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#8. There is a significant Latin proverb; to wit: Who will guard the guards?
Josh Billings
#9. An idea has just come to me from nowhere, to wit: Might not the ancient and nearly universal belief that sperm could be metabolized into noble actions have been the inspiration for Einsten's very similar formula: 'E equals MC squared'?
Kurt Vonnegut
#10. I have read that there are two fears that cannot be trained out of us: the startle reaction upon hearing an unexpected noise, and vertigo. I would like to add a third, to wit, the rapid and direct approch of a known killer
Yann Martel
#11. Religion supposed Heaven and Hell, the word of God, and sacraments, and twenty other circumstances which, taken seriously, are a wonderful check to wit and humour.
Jonathan Swift
#12. The great secret of succeeding in conversation is to admire little, to hear
much; always to distrust our own reason, and sometimes that of our
friends; never to pretend to wit, but to make that of others appear as much
as possibly we can; to hearken.
Benjamin Franklin
#13. I never have frustrations. The reason is to wit: Of at first I don't succeed, I quit!
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#14. A joker is near akin to a buffoon; and neither of them is the least related to wit.
Lord Chesterfield
#15. To wit: actions, like sounds, divide the flow of time into beats.[ ... ]The quality of a man's life depends on the rhyhmic structure he is able to impose upon the input and output of energy.
Tom Robbins
#16. [General-in-Chief of the army, Lieutenant General Winfield] Scott not only believed that the idea [for a battlefield decoration, to wit, a Medal of Honor, or valor] smacked of Old World vanity, elitism, and snobbery, he also thought that such an award was entirely unnecessary.
Russell S. Bonds
#17. Giving votes in exchange for ideological support. To wit: identity politics for homosexuals.
Harry Hay
#18. To which I answered, That the intent of my coming thither, and to other places, was to instruct, and counsel people to forsake their sins, and close in with Christ, lest they did miserably perish; and that I could do both these without confusion (to wit), follow my calling, and preach the Word also.
John Bunyan
#19. But assuming the same premises, to wit, that all men are equal by the law of nature and of nations, the right of property in slaves falls to the ground; for one who is equal to another cannot be the owner or property of that other.
William H. Seward
#20. And the people who live in the southern part of my state do not have a secure environment. To wit, there are signs that the government put up that say, 'Warning. You are in a drug smuggling area and a human smuggling area.'
John McCain
#21. The best thing next to wit is a consciousness that it is not in us; without wit, a man might then know how to behave himself, so as not to appear to be a fool or a coxcomb.
Jean De La Bruyere
#22. With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference between the half and the whole.
Henry David Thoreau
#23. As every inquiry which regards religion is of the utmost importance, there are two questions in particular which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning it origin in human nature.
David Hume
#24. There are problems humans cannot solve, to wit: density dependent birth rates, loss of genetic diversity, the overturning of his population pyramid, traveling to the nearest star, and the extinction of Man.
Bill Gaede
#25. You may well ask how I expect to assert my privacy by resorting to the outrageous publicity of being one's actual self on paper. There's a possibility of it working if one chooses the terms, to wit: outshouting image-gimmick America through a quietly desperate search for self.
Kate Millett
#26. All that stock of arguments [the skeptics] produce to depreciate our faculties, and make mankind appear ignorant and low, are drawn principally from this head, to wit, that we are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things.
George Berkeley
#28. To wit, existence is communication and communication is existence.
Haruki Murakami
#29. The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.
H.L. Mencken
#30. There are nine orders of angels, to wit, angels, archangels, virtues, powers, principalities, dominations, thrones, cherubim, and seraphim
Billy Graham
#31. This book bore the label R>3214 VIII/2. And this painful truth was suddenly borne in upon the mind of Monsieur Sariette: to wit, that the most scientific system of numbering will not help to find a book if the book is no longer in its place.
Anatole France
#32. Neatness of phrase is so closely akin to wit that it is often accepted as its substitute.
Agnes Repplier
#33. Fool, 'tis in vain from wit to wit to roam: Know, sense, like charity, begins at home.
Alexander Pope
#34. The things ... are esteemed as the greatest good of all ... can be reduced to these three headings: to wit, Riches, Fame, and Pleasure. With these three the mind is so engrossed that it cannot scarcely think of any other good.
Baruch Spinoza
#35. True to the precepts handed down to her by her mother and grandmother - to wit: that a true lady can neither be shocked nor surprised - Miss Marple merely raised her eyebrows and shook her head,
Agatha Christie
#36. Scholars discern motions of history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules, only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts and virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief.
David Mitchell
#37. That's the old ecological tale that explains humans' inability to fully appreciate global warming. To wit: if you drop a frog in a pan of hot water, it jumps out. If you drop it in a pan of cold water, then turn the heat up slowly, you can roast it to death.
Clive Thompson
#38. Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.
Thomas Jefferson
#39. Of all questions, why? is the least pertinent. It begs the question; it assumes the larger part of its own response; to wit, that a sensible response exists.
Jack Vance
#40. To wit, can authenticity be aware of itself as such and still be authentic? I
Michael Pollan
#41. In the language of politics, there is only one translation for the phrase 'hope and change,' to wit: 'big, fat government.'
P. J. O'Rourke
#42. Let man reawake and consider what he is compared with the reality of things; regard himself lost in this remote corner of Nature; and from the tiny cell where he lodges, to wit the Universe, weigh at their true worth earth, kingdoms, towns, himself. What is a man face to face with infinity?
Blaise Pascal
#44. A depressing number of people seem to process everything literally. They are to wit as a blind man is to a forest, able to find every tree, but each one coming as a surprise.
Roger Ebert
#45. Sun Tzu said: We may distinguish six kinds of terrain, to wit: (1) Accessible ground; (2) Entangling ground; (3) Temporizing ground; (4) Narrow passes; (5) Precipitous heights; (6) Positions at a great distance from the enemy.
Sun Tzu
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. If you have to explain your sense of humor, then you are performing for the wrong crowd.
Shannon L. Alder
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.
William Hazlitt
#54. 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
#55. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. It was rather too late in the day to set about being simple-minded and ignorant.
Jane Austen
#60. We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, so we buy ice cream.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. It takes a hell of a lot for a man to put up with me. I can be a handful.
Michael Jordan
#66. 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
#67. 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
#69. In retrospect, I am very nearly as sharp as I pretend to be.
Lyndsay Faye
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Men whose wit has been mother of villainy once have learned from it to be evil in all things.
Sophocles
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#78. I wouldn't want to put out anyone's eye with my wit.
Dannika Dark
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. The key to spontaneous wit is an unburdened mind.
Darwin Ortiz
#91. 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
#92. 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
#94. There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope.
Oscar Wilde
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. One no more owes one's beauty to a lover than one's wit to an echo
William Congreve
#98. Things are bound to begin happening if you've got your wits about you. You create the lucky accidents.
Lewis Thomas
#99. Writings may be compared to wine. Sense is the strength, but wit the flavor.
Laurence Sterne
#100. 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
