Top 1200 Mother Wit Quotes & Sayings

This fellow pecks up wit, as pigeons peas; And utters it again when God doth please: He is wit's pedler; and retails his wares.

No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life.

You know, Gilan, sarcasm isn't the lowest form of wit. It's not even wit at all." -Halt

A small degree of wit, accompanied by good sense, is less tiresome in the long run than a great amount of wit without it.

Moment I stop havin fun wit it, I'll be done wit it.

Wit is artificial; humor is natural. Wit is accidental; humor is inevitable. Wit is born of conscious effort; humor, of the allotted ironies of fate. Wit can be expressed only in language; humor can be developed sufficiently in situation.

Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian or an ordinary man has; but I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.

Listen carefully to what country people call mother wit. In those homely sayings are couched the collective wisdom of generations.

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

Borrowed wit is the poorest wit.

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.

When I looked at my mother, I always saw a bit of Ireland. And I suppose when I look to Ireland, I see a bit of my mother - her faith, her wit, her endurance.

I think humor is warmer, and wit is colder. Wit is judgment, whereas humor invites some sort of response.

The art of conversation consists far less in displaying much wit oneself than in helping others to be witty: the man who leaves your company pleased with himself and his own wit is very well pleased with you.

I shall endeavour to enliven Morality with Wit, and to temper Wit with Morality, that my Readers may, if possible, both Ways findtheir Account in the Speculation of the Day.

wit, wit! - I look upon it always as a draught of air; it cools indeed, but one gets a stiff neck from it.

Wit penetrates; humor envelops. Wit is a function of verbal intelligence; humor is imagination operating on good nature.

Wit, to be well defined, must be defined by wit itself; then it will be worth listening to.

Most of you probably didn't know that I have a new book out. Some guy put together a collection of my wit and wisdom - or, as he calls it, my accidental wit and wisdom. But I'm kind of proud that my words are already in book form.

Indeed I had not much wit, yet I was not an idiot - my wit was according to my years.

If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again.

Wit must be foiled by wit: cut a diamond with a diamond.

I'm grateful to intelligent people. That doesn't mean educated. That doesn't mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call 'mother wit' means intelligence that you had in your mother's womb. That's what you rely on. You know what's right to do.

In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.

Men whose wit has been mother of villainy once have learned from it to be evil in all things.

What do you do with mother love and mother wit when the babies are grown and gone away?

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

Who can prove Wit to be witty when with deeper ground Dulness intuitive declares wit dull?

Wit is the appearance, the external flash, of fantasy. Hence its divinity and the similarity to the wit of mysticism.

Competition is what keeps me playing the psychological warfare of matching skill against skill and wit against wit.

In cheerful souls there is no wit. Wit shows a disturbance of the equipoise.

Fool, 'tis in vain from wit to wit to roam: Know, sense, like charity, begins at home.

Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts- O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power So to seduce!

For those whose wit becomes the mother of villainy, those it educates to be evil in all things.

I'd really like to go with you, Agachak. Truly I would...but I just can't." "I don't understand. Why not?" "I'm not allowed to leave home. My mother'd punish me something awful if I did..." "But you're the king." "That doesn't change a thing. I still do what mother says. She tells everybody that I'm the best boy ever when it comes to that." Agachak resisted a powerful urge to change this half-wit into a toad or perhaps a jellyfish.

I've always been willing to take challenges, I grew up taking challenges: being an only child, having a mother, no father, I've always been one who has always done things the way I thought they should be done and not, and not having to answer to anybody for it and I've always taken my own chances and I've always followed by instincts according, mother would follow, follow wit, instincts, wisdom, whatever, always followed that.

Fortune, the great commandress of the world, Hath divers ways to advance her followers: To some she gives honor without deserving; To other some, deserving without honor; Some wit, some wealth,--and some, wit without wealth; Some wealth without wit; some nor wit nor wealth.

My mother studied English and drama at the University of Pennsylvania, where my father studied architecture. She was a great influence in all sorts of ways, a wicked wit.

Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy.

I think that, when you play a mother, whether you play a bad mother or a not so great mother or an amazing mother, being a mother is already so complicated. It's already three-dimensional, automatically, no matter what the role is, because you're playing a mother.

Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.

Wit invents; inspiration reveals. The inventions of wit are conceits - metaphors and paradoxes - that discover the secret correspondences that unite beings and things among and with themselves; inspiration is condemned to dissipate its revelations - unless a form can be found to contain them.

India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.

The Great slight the men of wit, who have nothing but wit; the men of wit despise the Great, who have nothing but greatness; the good man pities them both, if with greatness or wit they have not virtue.

Wit is something more than a gymnastic trick of the intellect; true wit implies a beam of thought into the essence of a question, a flash that lights up a situation. Wit suggests the delicate but delightful play of a rapier in the hands of a master.

My father's wit, and my mother's tongue, assist me!

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.

There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

I shall endeavor to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality.

It is having in some measure a sort of wit to know how to use the wit of others.

Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words.

Whatever has "wit enough to keep it sweet" defies corruption and outlasts all time; but the wit must be of that outward and visible order which needs no introduction or demonstration at our hands.

Sense is our helmet, wit is but the plume; The plume exposes, 'tis our helmet saves. Sense is the diamond, weighty, solid, sound; When cut by wit, it casts a brighter beam; Yet, wit apart, it is a diamond still.

Freedom, where are you? Who holds you back? [...] The mother of wit and pleasure, Oh freedom!

Metaphor is, as a common feature of linguistic practice, an incidental expediency, a homely administering of first-aid by mother-wit to jams or halts in expression suddenly confronting speakers, with no respectable linguistic solution immediately in sight.

By wit we search divine aspect above, By wit we learn what secrets science yields, By wit we speak, by wit the mind is rul'd, By wit we govern all our actions; Wit is the loadstar of each human thought, Wit is the tool by which all things are wrought.

One should have wit, but not wish to have it; otherwise there will be witticism, the Alexandrian style of wit.

you can give it a long name if you like, but I'm an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it's so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes.

Just because you're unemployed doesn't mean you're not doing anything useful. You are, for example, at least keeping your mother-in-law's wit sharp.

Wit and wisdom differ; wit is upon the sudden turn, wisdom is bringing about ends.