Variant: Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit.
Source: Twelfth Night
“Your wit makes others witty.”
Catherine the Great (1729–1796) Empress of Russia
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
“A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one.”
Un sot savant est sot plus qu'un sot ignorant.
Act IV, sc. iii
Les Femmes Savantes (1672)
“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)
James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright
Letter, March 11, 1954, to Malcolm Cowley. Collecting Himself (1989)
Letters and interviews
Scott Lynch (1978) American writer
In George R. R. Martin & Gardner Dozois (eds.) Rogues (p. 245)
Short fiction, A Year and a Day in Old Theradane (2014)
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
“In wars, boy, fools kill other fools for foolish causes.”
Robert Jordan book The Eye of the World
Thom Merrilin
(15 January 1990)
Source: To the Blight
“Foolish: It's all foolish. Life is a farce— a stupid, sickening farce played out by fools.”
David Gemmell book The King Beyond the Gate
Source: Drenai series, The King Beyond the Gate, Ch. 16
