Wit Quotes

Wit is educated insolence. (Aristotle)
Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food. View quote
William Hazlitt
I shall endeavor to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality. View quote
Joseph Addison
Woman: the peg on which the wit hangs his jest, the preacher his text, the cynic his grouch and the sinner his justification. View quote
Helen Rowland
Brevity is the soul of wit. View quote
William Shakespeare
It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to show a ready wit all day long than to produce an occasional bon mot. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people - that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature. View quote
James Thurber
She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit. View quote
W. Somerset Maugham
Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism. View quote
Friedrich Schlegel
What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Wit lies in recognizing the resemblance among things which differ and the difference between things which are alike. (Anne Louise Germaine de Staël)
Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear. View quote
James Thurber
Impropriety is the soul of wit. View quote
W. Somerset Maugham
Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one's wit at the expense of one's better nature. View quote
Montesquieu
Of Manners gentle, of Affections mild; In Wit a man; Simplicity, a child. View quote
Alexander Pope
Making a book is a craft, as is making a clock it takes more than wit to become an author. View quote
Jean de La Bruyère
A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a pebble in the hand of a fool. View quote
Joseph Roux
No man is so much a fool as not to have wit enough sometimes to be a knave; nor any so cunning a knave as not to have the weakness sometimes to play the fool. View quote
George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax
He is winding the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike. View quote
William Shakespeare
The well of true wit is truth itself. View quote
George Meredith
Prithee don't screw your wit beyond the compass of good manners. (Colley Cibber)
This man Chesterfield, I thought, had been a Lord among wits but I find he is only a wit among Lords. View quote
Samuel Johnson
Good nature is more agreeable in conversation than wit and gives a certain air to the countenance which is more amiable than beauty. View quote
Joseph Addison
Her wit was more than man, her innocence a child. View quote
John Dryden
The whole Scotch nation hitherto has been void of wit and humour, and even incapable of relishing it. View quote
Horace Walpole