"Wittily" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been a brilliant figure. I have good personal reason to remember his most striking effort. His speech had relation to an Army Reform Bill, and it was a mosaic of the aptest and most wittily applied literary quotations. It was of so fine a literary quality that I very much doubt if there were a score of people among his hearers who were able ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... Comedian, and yet never any Scholar, as our Shakespear (if alive) would confess himself; but by keeping company with Learned persons, and conversing with jocular Wits, whereto he was naturally inclin'd, he became so famously witty, or wittily famous, that by his own industry, without the help of Learning, he attained to an extraordinary height in all strains of Dramatick Poetry, especially in the Comick part, wherein we may say he outwent himself; yet was ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... the premier's hopes were visionary. Sheridan, indeed, asserted that there neither was nor could be any surplus, and he said, that the only means which suggested themselves to him were a loan of a million every year. "The right honourable gentleman," he wittily remarked, "might say with the person in the comedy, 'If you wont lend me the money, how can I pay you?'" In conclusion, Sheridan moved a long string of objections, which were all negatived without a division; but on the day for reconsidering the report of the committee on the bill, an ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... more wittily broad than anything which had gone before. The audience was excessively amused by it. It was indeed the triumph of the evening, and nothing could exceed the grace and point of the little speech in which M. Edmond, the manager of the cafe, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... proletariat dug his elbows in his comrade's ribs and, quoting a music-hall tag of the period, shouted "He's got 'em on!" whereupon both burst into peals of robustious but inane laughter. Now, if I had turned to them, and said, "He would be funnier if I hadn't," and paraphrased, however wittily, Carlyle's ironical picture of a nude court of St. James's, they would have punched my head under the confused idea that I was trying to bamboozle them. Which brings me to my point of departure, my remark to Judith as to the futility of ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... made his services at times so very useful to his country; his powers seemed in their full meridian of splendour when an argument or new doctrine permitted him rapidly to run down into its consequence, and then brilliantly and wittily to skew its defects. In this he eminently excelled. The beauties of the anti-Jacobin are replete with his satire. He never attempted a display of depth, but his dry sarcasm left a sting which those he intended ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... officer with the same freedom as if he had been carrying him to some merry-meeting; and, on observing on his men's coats a badge all full of points, with this device—monstrorum terror,—'the terror of monsters,' he said wittily, pointing to the men, 'Behold there the terror, and here the monster!' meaning himself. 'And if either of the Kings had a hundred thousand of such, they would be fitter to fright their enemies than to hurt any one of them.' He took occasion, also, to let his attendants know of what ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... great deal of curious matter for speculation in the accounts here so wittily given by M. de Bernard: but, perhaps, it is still more curious to think of what he has NOT written, and to judge of his characters, not so much by the words in which he describes them, as by the unconscious testimony that the words all together convey. In the first place, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of artists, which is lively, witty, and sometimes rather free, and I felt somewhat disturbed at the idea of entering a house so serious as yours—a house peopled by dignified lawyers and young ladies. But I was so fond of your brother, I found him so full of novelty, so gay, so wittily sarcastic and discerning, under his assumed levity, that not only did I go everywhere with him, but I followed him to the extent of meeting you. And I never cease to thank him for it. Do you remember when I entered the drawing-room ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... reached Rio de Janeiro on the 6th of December, having put in at Gibraltar, and made a short stay at Teneriffe, one of the Canaries, which, as Freycinet wittily observes, were not Fortunate Islands for his crew, all communication with the land being ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... gravely with something in his eyes that puzzled Miss Schuyler, who had expected a wittily graceful speech. ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... described this visit of Madame de Stael so wittily, with so much naivete, and with such peculiar local coloring, that we cannot refrain from laying a literal translation of the ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... dight to their dinner In a tavern where they were. King Richard the fire bet; Thomas to the spit him set; Fouk Doyley tempered the wood: Dear abought they that good! When they had drunken well, a fin, A minstralle com theirin, And said, "Gentlemen, wittily, Will ye have any minstrelsy?" Richard bade that she should go; That turned him to mickle woe! The minstralle took in mind,[1] And said, "Ye are men unkind; And, if I may, ye shall for-think[2] Ye gave me neither meat ne drink. For gentlemen should bede To minstrels that abouten yede, Of their ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... to make my dramatic compositions pay, as I could not understand how he, without any knowledge of the German language, could rightly appreciate the music, which was so closely allied to the sense of the poetry, he answered wittily that it was precisely my music which afforded him the best guidance to a comprehension of the poem itself. This reply strongly attracted me to the man, and from that time I found great pleasure in keeping up an active correspondence ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... wittily to the occasion.) But how can I watch and pray when I am asleep? Isn't that so, ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... (1818) is the best, attributed it to Richard Brathwait (circ. 1588-1673). The title of the second edition (1716) runs as follows: 'Drunken Barnaby's Four Journeys to the North of England. In Latin and English Verse. Wittily and merrily (tho' near one hundred years ago) composed; found among some old musty books, that had a long time lain by in a corner; and now at last made publick. To ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... life of the United States. Why, Democrats constitute nearly one half the voters of this country. They are engaged in all sorts of enterprises, big and little. There isn't a walk of life or a kind of occupation in which you won't find them; and, as a Philadelphia paper very wittily said the other day, they can't commit economic murder without committing economic suicide. Do you suppose, therefore, that half of the population of the United States is going about to destroy the very foundations of our economic life by simply running amuck amidst the schedules ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... was a part of the edifice that the ancients always endeavored to conceal, it being an excrescence in architecture that was only to be tolerated on account of its usefulness. Besides, as he wittily added, a chief merit in a dwelling was to present a front on whichever side it might happen to be seen; for, as it was exposed to all eyes in all weathers, there should be no weak flank for envy or unneighborly criticism to assail. ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... the least, ma'am; I advoise you to double the dose. We often hear of two strings to a bow. Daun't you think it would be noicer to have two beaux to your string?" As he thus wittily expressed himself, the gentleman took off his cap, and thrust his fingers through a very curling and comely head of hair; the young lady looked at him with evident coquetry, and said, "How you do ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a young lady who showed herself to have been bathed in the Britannic fluid, wittily described by a late French writer, by the impossibility she experienced of accommodating herself to the indecorums of the scene. We ladies were to sleep in the bar-room, from which its drinking visitors ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... stage of his preaching he felt called upon to oppose the "Spanish Marriage" as "the great sin of matching with idolaters," and he underwent a series of imprisonments for his attacks upon this precious scheme of King James, who wittily suggested changing his name from Dr. Everard ["Ever-out"] to "Dr. Never-out." Some time before his fiftieth year—the date cannot be exactly fixed—he reached {240} his new and deeper insight, and henceforth became the bearer of a message ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... had admirers. But Boston has at no time been without a serious intellectual life of its own, nor without a circle of highly educated men of literary pursuits, even in default of great geniuses. The North American Review, established in 1815, though it has been wittily described as "ponderously revolving through space" for a few years after its foundation, did not exist in an absolute vacuum, but was scholarly, if somewhat heavy. Webster, to be sure, was a Massachusetts man—as were Everett and Choate—but his triumphs were won in the wider field of national ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... preachers who 'supplied' the chapel. The bishops themselves did not disdain to attend 'incognito;' curtained seats were placed immediately inside the door, where the prelates were smuggled in; and this was wittily called 'Nicodemus's corner.' The Duchess of Buckingham accepted an invitation from Lady Huntingdon to attend her chapel at Bath in the following words: 'I thank your ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist preachers; their doctrines are most repulsive and strongly tinctured ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... about Christian Science, and could easily be led to expose its falsity. He would wittily say it wasn't Christian and wasn't science; merely the chuckleheadedness of a lot of women. This because a local adept of the cult had told him, and—what was worse—told Mrs. Penniman and Winona, that if he didn't quit thinking he was an ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... off his late intent, For sharply he did think to reprehend her, Which cunning love did wittily prevent: Fair fall the wit that can so well defend her! 472 For on the grass she lies as she were slain Till his breath breatheth ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare
... language of tradesmen with the language of mythology and theology to suggest, rather wittily and effectively, that disorder can be commonplace and ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... the most solemn Obligations to attempt hardy Atchievements; and upon this Whimsy immediately pursuing the most romantic Adventures, with great Gravity, Importance, and Self- sufficiency; To heighten your Mirth, the hardy Atchievements to be accomplish'd by this Hero, are wittily contrasted by his own meagre weak Figure, and the desperate Unfierceness of his Steed Rozinante;—The Ridicule appears in the strange Absurdity of the Attempts, upon which the Knight chuses to exercise his Prowess; ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... comparing her with others all the time, with men and women—women especially—in whose presence he felt himself as diffident as she did in his. He was thinking of ladies in velvet dresses and diamonds, who could talk wittily of pictures and theatres and books, who could amuse him and distract him. And meanwhile she went about in her old stuff dress, her cotton apron and rolled-up sleeves, cooking and washing and cleaning—for her child and ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... old schoolfellows, and they regarded him with almost respectful admiration. He talked away very wittily for half an hour; he had been set upon a pedestal, and wished to justify the opinion of his fellow-townsmen; so he stood with his hands thrust into his pockets, and held forth from the height to which he had been raised. He was modest and good-natured, as befitted genius ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... happy had it been for Hannibal if adversity could have taught him as much wisdom as was learnt by Scipio from the highest prosperities. This would be no wonder if it were as truly as it is colourably and wittily said by Monsieur de Montaigne, that ambition itself might teach us to love solitude: there is nothing does so much hate to have companions. It is true, it loves to have its elbows free, it detests ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... what the terrors which Ruskin suffered were—very few people will tell the tale of the valley of hobgoblins, or probably cannot! In the Pilgrim's Progress itself, the unreality of the spirits of fear, their secrecy and leniency, is very firmly and wittily told. They scream in their dens, sitting together, I have thought, like fowls in a roost. They come padding after the pilgrim, they show themselves obscurely, swollen by the mist at the corners of the road. They give the sense of being banded together in a numerous ambush, ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Ehrenfels wittily remarks that if it were a moral precept that a man should never have intercourse more them once in his life with any particular woman, this would correspond far better with the nature of the normal male and would cost him far less will-power ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... respective neighbors. But if so, they regarded it as untimely interruption of the real business of the evening. It was amazing the number of things they found to discuss and they discussed them so earnestly and withal, as it seemed to them, so wittily and wisely that they were blissfully unaware of the significant smiles going around the table. When the coffee was served, ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... Sun" and "The True Briton," the advent of which was much resented by Mr. Walter of "The Times," after his support of the Government.[101] Apparently these papers were of a more popular type, and heralded the advent of a cheap and sensational royalism. Sheridan wittily advised that the motto of "The Sun" should be, not merely the beginning, but ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... inspiration and seems essential to the highest religious eloquence. He believed thoroughly every word he uttered, but he did not feel it, and in things spiritual the heart must be enlisted as well as the head. It was wittily said of a well-known anti-slavery leader, that had he lived in the Middle Ages he would have gone to the stake for a principle, under a misapprehension as to the facts. Mr. Webster not only could never have ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... show his whole case of broad strong white teeth. Father Aldrovand himself grinned in sympathy, and then proceeded to say,—"Come, come, I see how it is. Thou hast studied some small revenge on me for doubting of thy truth; and, in verity, I think thou hast taken it wittily enough. But wherefore didst thou not let me into the secret from the beginning? I promise thee I had foul suspicions ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... willing to talk, when the humor seized him, and he did talk, brilliantly, wittily, freely, and impersonally. The egoistic "I" was conspicuous by its absence. And while he talked you could see the agile antennae of The Author's winged mind feeling after the soul-string that might lead him through the mazes of this unusual character. That he could be ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... made a fool of himself in her presence. Besides, Miss Johnson was marriageable, and much as De Forest loved the sex, he loved his freedom more. His morals were on a par with those of Sheridan's son, who wittily asked his father, just after he had been lecturing him, and advising him to take a wife, "But, father, whose wife shall I take?" Day after day passed wearily to him; Jenkintown without Mrs. Maroney was a dreary waste. He ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... is better than John Bull, but he is tarred with the English stick. For Mr. Grant White the States are the New England States and nothing more. He wonders at the amount of drinking in London; let him try San Francisco. He wittily reproves English ignorance as to the status of women in America; but has he not himself forgotten Wyoming? The name Yankee, of which he is so tenacious, is used over the most of the great Union as a term of reproach. The Yankee States, of which he is so ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the openings; so that from the pit of the circus of slaughter there may reach them only at intervals a half-heard cry and a murmur as of the wind's sighing, when myriads of souls expire. They shut out the death-cries; and are happy, and talk wittily among themselves. That is the utter literal fact of what our ladies ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... inviting in the first appearance of Western Australia; dull-green-looking downs, backed by a slightly undulating range of hills, rising to nearly 2,000 feet high, are the chief natural features of the prospect. Fremantle, of which it was wittily said by the quartermaster of one of His Majesty's ships who visited the place, "You might run it through an hourglass in a day," is but a collection of low white houses scattered over the scarce whiter sand. The only conspicuous landmark visible in approaching the anchorage ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... innocence was such, As scarce would lend them feeling of their danger: The girl so simple, as she often ask'd "Where they would lead her? for what cause they dragg'd her?" Cried, "She would do no more:" that she could take "Warning with beating." And because our laws Admit no virgin immature to die, The wittily and strangely cruel Macro Deliver'd her to be deflower'd and spoil'd, By the rude lust of the licentious hangman, Then to be strangled with her ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... that the conqueror of Holland, shattered by his misfortunes and too proud to undergo a public trial, cut short a life which already was doomed. Never have plotters failed more ignominiously and played more completely into the hands of their enemy. A mot of the Boulevards wittily sums up the results of their puny efforts: "They came to France to give her a king, and they ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... times had reduced speechmaking after dinner to a minimum. The ladies, as Father de Berey wittily remarked, preferred private confession to public preaching; and long speeches, without inlets for reply, were the eighth mortal sin which no ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... side of the city to a breathing-space for future generations, turning the meadow into a promenade and the hill into the Buen Retiro. The people growled terribly at the time, as they did at nearly everything this prematurely liberal government did for them. The wise king once wittily said: "My people are like bad children that kick the shins of their nurse whenever their ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... religious tenets (for which millions have suffered) was introduced for no other reason than that the clergy, who took upon them to be the sole judges of religion, might, without control, impose what selfish doctrines they pleased." Of the High Church clergy he wittily observes: "Some say that their lives might serve for a very good rule, if men would act quite contrary to them; for then there is no Christian virtue which ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... chose it; Sir Joshua Reynolds agreed with me that he could. Mr. Gibbon, with his usual sneer, controverted it, perhaps in resentment of Johnson's having talked with some disgust of his ugliness[245], which one would think a philosopher would not mind. Dean Marlay wittily observed, 'A lady may be vain, when she can turn a wolf-dog ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... the people, of progress, with the rhetoricalities of the modern Arcadians; and he has a poem called "The Ball", which must fairly, as it certainly does wittily, represent one of those anomalous entertainments which rich foreigners give in Italy, and to which all sorts of irregular aliens resort, something of the local aristocracy appearing also in a ghostly and bewildered way. Yet even in this poem there ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... difficulty making way for it. And the crowd, mistaking it for something else, rushed off to gaze and cheer excitedly at the prisoners within. The postman who sat mounting guard over the netted window at the rear smiled wittily at the popular error which made him for a few brief moments so conspicuous a figure. No doubt the incident gave the newspaper-man some copy, and the van, having contributed its share to the general amusement, rolled ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... studieing the grammar in the Jesuits Colledge at Poictiers, disputing before the regent on their Lesson, the on demanded, Mater cuius generis est: the other, knowing that the mother of the proponer had a wery ill name of a whore, replied wittily, distinguo; da distinctionem then; replied, si intelligas de mea est faeminini; si de tua, est communis (in the same sort does Rosse ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... experience of indifferent people, became an intense pain and grief when it seemed to be opening to me the souls of those who were in a close relation to me—when the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... call it a Spanish Grandee, for, in fact, it is but a shallow and dirty stream; and as Quevedo wittily informs us, "Mancanares is reduced, during the summer season, to the melancholy condition of the wicked rich man, who asks for water in the depths of hell." Though so small, this stream in the time of a flood spreads itself over the neighbouring fields; for this reason ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... were all at roost, so they could look at them quietly. But there were no geese! There were Shanghais, and Cochin-Chinas, and Guinea hens, and Barbary hens, and speckled hens, and Poland roosters, and bantams, and ducks, and turkeys, but not one goose! "No geese but ourselves," said Mrs. Peterkin, wittily, as they returned to the house. The sight of this procession roused up the village. "A torch-light procession!" cried all the boys of the town; and they gathered round the house, shouting for the ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... rode, Rosamund was characteristically amusing, sailing blandly over the shoals of scandal, though Eileen never suspected it—wittily gay at her own expense, as well as at others, flitting airily from topic to topic on the wings of a self-assurance that becomes some women if they know when to stop. But presently the mischievous perversity in her bubbled up again; she was tired of being ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... verily it is naturally given...suppressed and ended.') He ridicules the new logic of his time; the Utopians could never be made to understand the doctrine of Second Intentions ('For they have not devised one of all those rules of restrictions, amplifications, and suppositions, very wittily invented in the small Logicals, which here our children in every place do learn. Furthermore, they were never yet able to find out the second intentions; insomuch that none of them all could ever see man himself in common, as they call him, though he be (as you know) ...
— The Republic • Plato |
