Source: Villette (1853), Chapter XXXVII: Sunshine
Macbride v. Macbride (1805), 4 Esp. 242.
“The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.”
This was declared without citation to have been attributed to Avicenna in A Rationalist Encyclopaedia : A Book of Reference on Religion, Philosophy, Ethics, and Science (1950), by Joseph McCabe, p. 43; it was also later wrongly attributed to Averroes in The Atheist World (1991) by Madalyn Murray O'Hair, p. 46. It actually originates as a statement by the atheist Al-Maʿarri, earlier translated into English in A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern (1906) by John Mackinnon Robertson, Vol. I, Ch. VIII : Freethought under Islam, p. 269, in the form: "The world holds two classes of men ; intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence."
Misattributed
“It is having in some measure a sort of wit to know how to use the wit of others.”
Maxims and Moral Sentences
“The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth.”
Foreward (p. vii)
Brave New World Revisited (1958)
Que les gens d'esprit sont bêtes.
Act I, scene i. Reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 883-86.
Le Barbier de Séville (1773)
“It may be said that his wit shines at the expense of his memory.”
Book III, ch. 11. Compare: "The Right Honorable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts", Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Speech in Reply to Mr. Dundas, in Sheridaniana.
Gil Blas (1715-1735)
“What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.”
Source: The Sense of an Ending
