Best Wittiest Quotes & Sayings

In Memory of M. B.

Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,
not sticks of burning incense.
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end
your magnificent disdain.
You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes,
and suffocated inside stifling walls.
Alone you let the terrible stranger in,
and stayed with her alone.
Now you're gone, and nobody says a word
about your troubled and exalted life.
Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn
at your dumb funeral feast.
Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain. — Anna Akhmatova

Already known as one of America's best and wittiest poets, William Trowbridge has, in Ship of Fool, found the perfect vessel to convey his vision: comic, tender, wry, compassionate, full of insight and rueful understanding of what it means to carry on, cream pies in the face, pants falling down as the Green Weenie rampages through our foolish, beautiful lives. — Charles Harper Webb

People like him had these weird thick skins. You insult them to their face and it whistles past their ears. They take irony as compliments and barely even notice your wittiest retorts. When — Niels Saunders

I usually say I write for the smartest, cleverest, wittiest audience I know, and that's me. — Harlan Ellison

I have a fantastic husband. Here's the honeymoon part: I still think he's the funniest, wittiest, most clever man I've ever known. — Sarah Jessica Parker

Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us. — James Russell Lowell

The simple equations that generate the convoluted Mandelbrot fractal have been called the wittiest remarks ever made. — John Allen Paulos

Then came time for her to marry. She had nine suitors. They all knelt round her in a circle. Standing in the middle like a princess, she did not know which one to choose: one was the handsomest, another the wittiest, the third was the richest, the fourth was most athletic, the fifth from the best family, the sixth recited verse, the seventh traveled widely, the eighth played the violin, and the ninth was the most manly. But they all knelt in the same way, they all had the same calluses on their knees. — Milan Kundera

The wittiest authors evoke a barely perceptible smile. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I remember when I posed as a customs officer so that I could meet Oscar Wilde. I said to him "Have you anything to declare?" He said "I have nothing to declare but my genius." I said "I'll put that down as nothing then shall I?" For I am the wittiest man on Earth. — Simon Munnery

The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth. — Stendhal

I own four copies of Robin WIlliams's Live on Broadway comedy special for HBO. One in Wilmington, one in L.A., one in my trailer, and one at my parents' house. I can watch it over and over again and it never gets old. He is the funniest, wittiest man on the planet! — Sophia Bush

Truth, when witty, is the wittiest of all things. — Augustus Hare

Instead of working for the survival of the fittest, we should be working for the survival of the wittiest - then we can all die laughing. — Lily Tomlin

If evolution was worth its salt, by now it should've evolved something better than survival of the fittest. I think a better idea would be survival of the wittiest. — Jane Wagner

Advertising companies hire the very brightest, wittiest young people to write for them. Not one single sentence of it is worth repeating. Why? Because it wasn't meant. — Brenda Ueland

Tis never for their wisdom that one loves the wisest, or for their wit that one loves the wittiest; 'tis for benevolence and virtue and honest fondness one loves people. — Hester Lynch Piozzi

If evolution was worth its salt, it should've evolved something better than 'survival of the fittest.' I think a better idea would be 'survival of the wittiest.' At least, that way, creatures that didn't survive could've died laughing. — Lily Tomlin

All women are competitors, and sisters most of all. Ladies are perpetually jockeying for position, sizing themselves up against their peers. I can't tell you how often I'm enjoined to comment on which lady is the prettiest, the wittiest, the most accomplished, the lightest on her feet. And who solicits these opinions? Always women, never men. Men could not care less. About those comparisons, at least. — Tessa Dare

Half the court thinks I'm the most beautiful woman in the world. All of them know that I am the wittiest and the most stylish. The king cannot take his eyes off me. Sir Thomas Wyatt has gone to France to escape me. But my sister, a year younger than me, is married and has two children by the king himself. When is it going to be my turn? When am I to be wed? Who is going to be the match for me?" There — Philippa Gregory

Consider what you have in the smallest well-chosen library-a company of the wisest and wittiest men which can be plucked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years. The men themselves were then hidden and inaccessible. They were solitary, impatient of interruption, and fenced by etiquette. But now they are immortal, and the thought they did not reveal, even to their bosom friends, is here written out in transparent words of light to us, who are strangers of another age. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The wittiest authors raise the very slightest of smiles. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself. — Harlan Ellison

My senior year of high school, I was voted 'Wittiest.' So, several years later, I decided to try my hand at writing humor to see if I could be witty enough to make some money. — Barbara Park

With my father and sister being very depressed for most of their lives, it was incumbent on me to try to make them laugh, in this ridiculous way. They were the wittiest people I knew, but to get a smile from them was like winning the lottery. — Miriam Toews

Beauty is something that is hard to debate. Every man thinks his ideal the best. But the wittiest woman rise to the top of this structure, conventional beauty often taking a back seat to a woman possessed of a clever tongue. — Anne Mallory

I love Oscar Wilde, still the wittiest writer of anyone, dead or living. — Christopher Buckley