Christian Nestell Bovee Quotes About Wit
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The most brilliant flashes of wit come from a clouded mind, as lightning leaps only from an obscure firmament.
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At the best, sarcasms, bitter irony, scathing wit, are a sort of swordplay of the mind. You pink your adversary, and he is forthwith dead; and then you deserve to be hung for it.
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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.
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Satire is an abuse of wit. It corrects few evils.
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Next to being witty, the best thing is being able to quote another's wit.
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The next best thing to being witty one's self, is to be able to be able to quote another's wit.
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Wit never appears to greater advantage than when it is successfully exerted to relieve from a dilemma, palliate a deficiency, or cover a retreat.
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Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.
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Wit is better as a seasoning than as a whole dish by itself.
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We take life too seriously: the office of wit is to correct this tendency.
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