This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"For I have lit on a great truth: to wit, that all men dwell, and life’s meaning changes for them with the meaning of the home." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Wit is cultured insolence." - Aristotle NULL
"By reading, we enjoy the dead; by conversation, the living; and by contemplation, ourselves. Reading enriches the memory, conversation polishes the wit; and contemplation improves the judgment. Of these, reading is the most important, as it furnishes both the others." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Conversation is the music of the mind, an intellectual orchestra, where all the instruments should bear a part, but where none should play together. Each of the performers should have a just appreciation of his own powers, otherwise an unskillful novice who might usurp the first fiddle, would infallibly get into a scrape. To prevent these mistakes, a good master of the band will be very particular in the assortment of the performers; if too dissimilar, there will be no harmony, if too few, there will be no variety; and, if too numerous, there will be no order, for the presumption of one prater, might silence the eloquence of a Burke, or the wit of a Sheridan, as a single kettle-drum would drown the finest solo of a Gionowich or a Jordini." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Memory is the friend of wit, but the treacherous ally of invention; there are many books that owe their success to two things; good memory of those who write them, and the bad memory of those who read them." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Reply with wit to gravity, and with gravity to wit. Make a full concession to your adversary; give him every credit for the arguments you know you can answer, and slur over those you feel you cannot. But above all, if he has the privilege of making his reply, take special care that the strongest thing you have to urge be the last." - Charles Caleb Colton
"He drew a circle that shut me out- heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But Love and I had the wit to win: we drew a circle that took him in." - Edwin Markham
"Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man; and, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not." - Francis Bacon
"The genius wit, and spirit of a nation are discovered in its proverbs." - Francis Bacon
"The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence." - George Santayana
"An ounce of mother wit is worth a pound of clergy." - John Adams
"Want is a bitter and hateful good, because its virtues are not understood; yet many things, impossible to thought, have been by need to full perfection brought; the daring of the soul proceeds from thence, sharpness of wit and active diligence; prudence at once, and fortitude it gives; and, if in patience taken, mends our lives." - John Dryden
"A cheerful temper, joined with innocence, will make beauty attractive, knowledge delightful, and wit good natured. It will lighten sickness, poverty and affliction; convert ignorance into an amiable simplicity, and render deformity itself agreeable." - Joseph Addison
"Good-nature is more agreeable in conversation than wit, and gives a certain air to the countenance which is more amiable than beauty. It shows virtue in the fairest light; takes off in some measure from the deformity of vice; and makes even folly and impertinence supportable." - Joseph Addison
"Cunning is only the mimic of discretion, and may pass upon weak men, as vivacity is often mistaken for wit, and gravity for wisdom." - Joseph Addison
"There are many shining qualities on the mind of man; but none so useful as discretion. It is this which gives a value to all the rest, and sets them at work in their proper places, and turns them to the advantage of their possessor. Without it, learning is pedantry; wit, impertinence; virtue itself looks like weakness; and the best parts only qualify a man to be more sprightly in errors, and active to his own prejudice. Though a man has all other perfections and wants discretion, he will be of no great consequence in the world; but if he has this single talent in perfection, and but a common share of others, he may do what he pleases in his station of life." - Joseph Addison
"A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a pebble in the hand of a fool." - Joseph Roux
"It is the “where I am” that makes heaven. The life after death might become through its very endlessness a burden to our spirits, if it were not to be filled wit the infinite variety and freshness of God’s love. Some have shrunk from its very infinitude, because they have not realized what God’s love can make of it. Human love helps us to understand this. When we have come to love any one with all our power of affection, then there is no monotony or weariness in the days and hours we spend with them." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"Both wit and understanding are trifles without integrity. The ignorant peasant without fault is greater than the philosopher with many. What is genius or courage without a heart?" - Oliver Goldsmith
"There is no less wit and invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book than in being the first author of that thought." - Pierre Bayle
"Beside the general infusion of wit to heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual power is ever welcome in fine society, as the costliest addition to its rule and its credit." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, all flock to their aid." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not happy in company, cannot find any word in his memory that will fit the occasion; all his information is a little impertinent. A man who is happy there, finds in every turn of the conversation occasions for the introduction of what he has to say. The favorites of society are able men, and of more spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly fills the hour and the company, contented and contending." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinction. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit. It is like ice, on which no beauty of form, no majesty of carriage, can plead any immunity; they must walk gingerly, according tot he laws of ice, or down they must go, dignity and all." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its own nature. The soul is not a compensation but a life. The soul is. Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Existence, or God, is not a relation or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts, and times within itself." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Wit is not only the luck of labour, but also the dexterity of thought." - William Davenant, fully Sir William Davenant, also spelled D'Avenant
"The first ingredient in conversation is truth; the next, good sense; the third, good humor; and the fourth, wit." - William Temple, fully Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet
"Men never think their fortune too great, nor their wit too little." - Thomas Fuller
"Wit should be used as a shield for defense rather than as a sword to wound others." - Thomas Fuller
"Wit without Wisdom cuts other Men's Meat, and its own Fingers." - Thomas Fuller
"False wit is a fatiguing search after cunning traits, an affectation of saying in enigmas what others have already said naturally, to hang together ideas which are incompatible, to divide that which ought to be united, of seizing false relations." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Silence is one great art of conversation. He is not a fool who knows when to hold his tongue; and a person may gain credit for sense, eloquence, wit, who merely says nothing to lessen the opinion which others have of these qualities in themselves." - William Hazlitt
"We prefer a person with vivacity and high spirits, though bordering up on insolence, to the timid and pusillanimous; we are fonder of wit joined to malice than of dullness without it." - William Hazlitt
"Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated." - William Hazlitt
"Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food." - William Hazlitt
"She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit." - W. Somerset Maugham, fully William Somerset Maugham
"Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"It is not enough to possess wit. One must have enough of it to avoid having too much." - André Maurois, born born Emile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog
"Experience is the common school-house of fools and ill men. Men of wit and honesty be otherwise instructed. " - Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, sometimes known as Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam
"Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory. " - Emily Post, born Emily Price
"The greatest error of all the rest is the mistaking or misplacing of the last or farthest end of knowledge: for men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men: as if there were sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or a tarrasse, for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state, for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding ground, for strife and contention; or a shop, for profit or sale; and not a rich storehouse, for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate." - Francis Bacon
"What we all have discovered together, only rarely in classrooms, is that the passage of years guarantees very little in the way of answers, that ambivalence and ambiguity will follow us all the days of our lives, but that words and wit and woods and food and music will endure as sources of comfort." - Jane Howard, fully Elizabeth Jane Howard
"It is a sad thing when men have neither the wit to speak well nor the judgment to hold their tongues." - Jean de La Bruyère
"Brevity is the body and soul of wit. It is wit itself, for it alone isolates sufficiently for contrasts; because redundancy or diffuseness produces no distinctions." - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
"There are many more shining qualities in the mind of man, but there is none so useful as discretion; it is this, indeed, which gives a value to all the rest, which sets them at work in their proper times and places, and turns them to the advantage of the person who is possessed of them. Without it, learning is pedantry, and wit impertinence ; virtue itself looks like weakness; the best parts only qualify a man to be more sprightly in errors, and active to his own prejudice." - Joseph Addison
"From authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence -- in Gibbon's polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla's command of the subjunctive, in Mailer's hyperbole and Dillard's similes, in Twain's invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world's colossal humbug . . . I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words." - Lewis H. Lapham