“Your wit makes others witty.”
Letter to Voltaire, as quoted in Short Sayings of Great Men : With Historical and Explanatory Notes (1882) by Samuel Arthur Bent, and Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (1922) revised and enlarged by Kate Loise Roberts
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Catherine the Great29
Empress of Russia 1729–1796Related quotes
“Who can prove
Wit to be witty when with deeper ground
Dulness intuitive declares wit dull?”
George Eliot book Scenes of Clerical Life
A College Breakfast-party, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)
“For what says Quinapalus? Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.”
William Shakespeare Twelfth Night
Variant: Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit.
Source: Twelfth Night
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar
Aphorism 26, as translated in Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms (1968), p. 151
Variant translation:
Wit is the appearance, the external flash, of fantasy. Hence its divinity and the similarity to the wit of mysticism.
As translated in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics (1996) edited by Frederick C. Beiser, p. 131
Christian Nestell Bovee (1820–1904) American writer
Source: Intuitions and Summaries of Thought (1862), Volume II, p. 124.
“Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist
D 25
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)
“Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.”
Elizabeth I of England (1533–1603) Queen regnant of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until 1603
To Sir Edward Dyer, as quoted in Apophthegms (1625) by Francis Bacon
James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright
Letter, March 11, 1954, to Malcolm Cowley. Collecting Himself (1989)
Letters and interviews