“thy wit is a very bitter sweeting; it is a most sharp sauce.”

— William Shakespeare , book Romeo and Juliet

Source: Romeo and Juliet

Last update Sept. 28, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "thy wit is a very bitter sweeting; it is a most sharp sauce." by William Shakespeare?

William Shakespeare photo

William Shakespeare 699

English playwright and poet 1564–1616

Related quotes

“In the midst of the fountain of wit there arises something bitter, which stings in the very flowers.”
Medio de fonte leporum surgit amari aliquid quod in ipsis floribus angat.

Lucretius (-94–-55 BC) Roman poet and philosopher

Book IV, lines 1133–1134 (reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations)
Variant translation: From the midst of the fountain of delights rises something bitter that chokes them all amongst the flowers.
Compare: "Still from the fount of joy's delicious springs / Some bitter o'er the flowers its bubbling venom flings", Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto I, stanza 82
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)

“Laissez Faire was very good sauce for the goose, labor, but was very poor sauce for the gander, capital.”

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939) American journalist and anarchist

¶ 19
State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherin They Differ (1888)

“This rudeness is a sauce to his good wit,
Which gives men stomach to digest his words
With better appetite.”

William Shakespeare Julius Caesar

Source: Julius Caesar

“The roots of education … are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy

The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

“Sweetness of life depends to its bitterness.”

Javad Alizadeh (1953) cartoonist, journalist and humorist

Quoted in Humor & Caricature (September 1995), p. 3

“What makes bitter things sweet? Hunger.”

Alcuin (735–804) English scholar and abbot

in R Lacey and D Danziger, The Year 1000, Little, Brown and Co,GB, 1999, p. 57

“Christ is not sweet till sin be made bitter to us.”

John Flavel (1627–1691) English Presbyterian clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 398.

“Wit without humanity degenerates into bitterness. Learning without prudence into pedantry.”

James Burgh (1714–1775) British politician

The Dignity of Human Nature (1754)

“Leaning on thy dear faithful breast,
I would resign my breath,
And in thy loved embraces lose
The bitterness of death.”

Lucretia Maria Davidson (1808–1825) American poet

A View Of Death

“Men have made an idol of luck as an excuse for their own thoughtlessness. Luck seldom measures swords with wisdom. Most things in life quick wit and sharp vision can set right.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Golden Sayings of Democritus

Related topics