Witty Quotes

130 Sourced quotes

George Meredith

Sacha Guitry

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

James Thurber

Edmond Rostand

Madonna

Marcel Proust

A witty woman is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power.

George Meredith

You can pretend to be serious but you can't pretend to be witty.

At all events, the next best thing to being witty one's self, is to be able to quote another's wit.

Christian Nestell Bovee

Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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.

A large nose is in fact the sign of an affable man, good, courteous, witty, liberal, courageous, such as I am.

No, sir, I'm not saying that charming, witty and warm copy won't sell. I'm just saying I've seen thousands of charming, witty campaigns that didn't sell.

Conversation should be pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, free without indecency, learned without conceitedness, novel without falsehood.

William Shakespeare

Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.

Elizabeth I of England

Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.

Lukewarm persons think they may accommodate points of religion by middle ways and witty reconcilements, — as if they would make an arbitrament between God and man.

The hostess is our modern Sibyl. She is a witch who lays her guests under a spell. In this house they think themselves happy; in that witty; in a third profound. It is all an illusion (which is nothing against it, for illusions are the most valuable and necessary of all things, and she who can create one is among the world's greatest benefactors), but as it is notorious that illusions are shattered by conflict with reality, so no real happiness, no real wit, no real profundity are tolerated where the illusion prevails.

There's many witty men whose brains can't fill their bellies.

Benjamin Franklin

For table-talk, I prefer the pleasant and witty before the learned and the grave; in bed, beauty before goodness.

Michel de Montaigne

Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.

I knew a witty physician who found theology in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was a disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Certain Laodiceans, and lukewarm persons, think they may accommodate points of religion, by middle way, and taking part of both, and witty reconcilements; as if they would make an arbitrament between God and man. Both these extremes are to be avoided; which will be done, if the league of Christians, penned by our Savior himself, were in two cross clauses thereof, soundly and plainly expounded: He that is not with us, is against us; and again, He that is not against us, is with us; that is, if the points fundamental and of substance in religion, were truly discerned and distinguished, from points not merely of faith, but of opinion, order, or good intention.

I am well aware how fond you are of Nothing, not so much for low price as for the sport, as delightful as it is witty, that it affords your pert sparrow; and so I can really guess that the closer a gift comes to Nothing the more welcome and acceptable it will be to you.

Johannes Kepler

She marking them begins a wailing note And sings extemporally a woeful ditty How love makes young men thrall and old men dote How love is wise in folly, foolish-witty Her heavy anthem still concludes in woe, And still the choir of echoes answer so.

William Shakespeare

I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.

William Shakespeare

One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.

For me, a male image that I'm really moved by is somewhere between of Oscar Wilde type of a male: the fop, the long hair, the suits, too witty for his own good, incredibly smart, scathingly funny - all that. But then my other ideal is more like the Buddhist monk - the shaved head, actually someone who sublimates their sexuality.

People who live in an age of corruption are witty and slanderous; they know that there are other kinds of murder than by dagger or assault; they also know that whatever is well said is believed...

Friedrich Nietzsche

I praise God for you, sir: your reasons at dinner have been sharp and sententious; pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange with-out heresy.

William Shakespeare

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.