“She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit…”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer
[1926, August, The Creative Impulse, Harper's Bazar, 41, 0017-7873, Hearst Corp., New York]
Revised with quotation in the 1931 compilation Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular.
Often misattributed to George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde
Short Stories
“Vulgarity is no substitute for wit”
Julian Fellowes (1949) English actor, dramatist, director, novelist, producer and screenwriter
“A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a pebble in the hand of a fool.”
Joseph Roux (1834–1905) French poet
Part 1, LXXIV
Meditations of a Parish Priest (1866)
“Manner is all in all, whate'er is writ,
The substitute for genius, sense, and wit.”
William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist
Source: Table Talk (1782), Line 542.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet
1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Quotation and Originality
Source: Prose and Poetry
“"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.”
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) American philosopher and logician
Quine's paradox, in "The Ways of Paradox" in "The Ways of Paradox and other Essays" (1976)
1970s
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature
Quoted in Cool Memories (1987) by Jean Baudrillard, (trans. 1990) Ch. 5; heard by Baudrillard at a lecture given in Paris.
Evan Esar (1899–1995) American writer
20,000 Quips & Quotes, Introduction, pviii
