“Humour is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher
Said in 1821, as quoted in Letters and Conversations of S.T. Coleridge (1836) by Thomas Allsop
On Scotland, in a etter to Sir Horace Mann (1778); comparable to "It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding", by Sydney Smith, Lady Holland's Memoir, vol. i. p. 15.
“Humour is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher
Said in 1821, as quoted in Letters and Conversations of S.T. Coleridge (1836) by Thomas Allsop
Hjalmar Schacht (1877–1970) German politician
As quoted Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (1946) by the United States Department of State, Vol. 2, p. 746.
Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War
Speech to Harrow School (18 December 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 950
The Second World War (1939–1945)
Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy
Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709), Part 1, Sec. 5, incorrectly attributing it to Gorgias via Aristotle.
Misattributed
“His idea of wit is a barrage of filth and the sort of humour most men grow out of in their teens.”
Jimmy Carr (1972) British comedian and humourist
Ann Widdecombe — reported in Adam Sherwin (December 24, 2008) "Gordon is game for a laugh at Chequers lunch - People Adam Sherwin", The Times, p. 11.
About
Johann Gottlieb Fichte book Address to the German Nation
Introduction p. 9-10
Addresses to the German Nation (Reden an die deutsche Nation) 1808, First Address of Fourteen
“For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.”
Virginia Woolf The Common Reader
Source: The Common Reader