Quotes
Quotes about Wit
Make ducks and drakes with shillings.
With tooth and nail.
As leopard feels at home with leopard.
To cut a whetstone with a razor.
The genius, wit, and spirit of a nation are discovered in its proverbs.
As Love and I late harbour'd in one inn, With proverbs thus each other entertain; "In love there is no lack," thus I begin; "Fair words make fools," replieth he again; "Who spares to speak doth spare to speed," quoth I; "As well," saith he, "too forward as too slow"; "Fortune assists the boldest," I reply; "A hasty man," quote he, "ne'er wanted woe"; "Labour is light where love," quote I, "doth pay"; "Light burden's heavy, if far borne"; Quoth I, "The main lost, cast the by away"; "Y'have spun a fair thread," he replies in scorn. And having thus awhile each other thwarted Fools as we met, so fools again we parted.
This formal fool, your man, speaks naught but proverbs, And speak men what they can to him he'll answer With some rhyme, rotten sentence, or old saying, Such spokes as ye ancient of ye parish use.
A proverb is one man's wit and all men's wisdom.
Behind the dim unknown, Standeth God with the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish, or a sparrow fall, Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd, And now a bubble burst, and now a world.
Out of the sea the sun aborning Not adorned but all adorning with his awesome light of morning says to you Come! My Mavoorning!
The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of man; and if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?
Friends, I agree with you in Providence; but I believe in the Providence of the most men, the largest purse, and the longest cannon.
Anybody who is 25 or 30 years old has physical scars from all sorts of things, from tuberculosis to polio. It's the same with the mind.
Every once in a while someone without a single bad habit gets caught.
...the evils of mankind are caused, not by the primary aggressiveness of individuals, but by their self-transcending identification with groups whose common denominator is low intelligence and high emotionality.
The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.
Benevolence is a commitment to achieving the values derivable from life with other people in society, by treating them as potential trading partners, recognizing their humanity, independence, and individuality, and the harmony between their interests and ours.
Science does not give us absolute and final certainty. It only gives us assurance within the limits of our mental abilities and the prevailing state of scientific thought.
The inertia of the human mind and its resistance to innovation are most clearly demonstrated not, as one might expect, by the ignorant mass- which is easily swayed once its imagination is caught- but by professionals with a vested interest in tradition and in the monopoly of learning. Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse. The academic backwoodsmen have been the curse of genius from Aristarchus to Darwin and Freud; they stretch, a solid and hostile phalanx of pedantic mediocrities, across the centuries.
Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.
Instinct is action taken in pursuance of a purpose, but without conscious perception of what the purpose is.
Our minds can work for us or against us at any given moment. We can learn to accept and live with the natural psychological laws that govern us, understanding how to flow with life rather than struggle against it. We can return to our natural state of contentment.
Art should be appreciated with passion and violence, not with a tepid, deprecating elegance that fears the censoriousness of a common room.
When scientific doctrines are mixed up with religious tenets, the same lifeless dogmatism will commonly benumb them both.
