Wit Quotes

Wit consists in assembling, and putting together with quickness, ideas in which can be found resemblance and congruity, by which to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy.

Locke.

Wit is not leveled so much at the muscles as at the heart; and the latter will sometimes smile when there is not a single wrinkle on the cheek.

Lyttleton.

Wit is brushwood; judgment, timber; the one gives the greatest flame, and the other yields the most durable heat; and both meeting make the best fire.

Overlung.

Wit is proper and commendable when it enlightens the intellect by good sense, conveyed in jocular expression; when it infringes neither on religion, charity, and justice, nor on peace; when it maintains good humor, sweetens conversation, and makes the endearments of society more captivating; when it exposes what is vile and base to contempt; when it reclaims the vicious, and laughs them into virtue; when it answers what is below refutation; when it replies to obloquy; when it counterbalances the fashion of error and vice, playing off their own weapons of ridicule against them; when it adorns truth; when it follows great examples; when it is not used upon subjects, improper for it, or in a manner unbecoming, in measure intemperate, at an undue season or to a dangerous end.

Barrow.

Less judgment than wit, is more sail than ballast. Yet it must be confessed that wit gives an edge to sense, and recommends it extremely.

Penn.

Let your wit rather serve you for a buckler to defend yourself, by a handsome reply, than the sword to wound others, though with never so facetious a reproach, remembering that a world cuts deeper than a sharper weapon, and the wound it makes is longer curing.

Osborn.

Be rather wise than witty, for much with hath commonly much froth, and it is hard of jest and not sometimes jeer too, which many times sinks deeper than was intended or expected, and what was designed for mirth ends in sadness.

C.Trenchild.

Where judgment has wit to express it, there is the best orator.

Penn.

Some people seem born with a head in which the thin partition that divides great with from folly is wanting.

Southey.

Wit loses its respect with the good, when seen in company with malice; and to smile at the jest which places a thorn in another’s breast, is to become a principal in the mischief.

Sheridan.

To place wit above sense is to place superfluity above utility.

Punning is a conceit arising from the use of two words that agree in the sound, but differ in the sense. 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 pronounce it true; but if it vanishes in the experiment, you may conclude it to have been a pun.

Addison.

Wit should be used as a shield for defence rather than as a sword to wound others.

Fuller.

Witticisms are never agreeable when they are injurious to others.

Wit is the most rascally, contemptible, beggarly thing on the face of the earth.

Murphy.

When wit transgresses decency, it degenerates into insolence and impiety.

Tillotson.

Great wits to madness sure are near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide.

Dryden.

As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing.

Rochefoucauld.

Wits is the salt of conversation, not the food.

Hazlitt.

The impromptu reply is precisely the touchstone of the man of wit.

Moliere.

Genuine and innocent wit is surely the flavor of the mind. Man could not direct his way by plain reason, and support his life by tasteless food; but God has given us wit, and flavor, and brightness, and laughter, and perfumes, to enliven the days of man’s pilgrimage, and to charm his pained steps over the burning marl.

Sydney Smith.

It is by vivacity and wit that man shines in company; but trite jokes and loud laughter reduce him to a buffoon.

Chesterfield.