Witless Quotes & Sayings

Man is a blind, witless, low brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions upon the earth. — Ian McHarg

Hairspray and blusher, eyelash curlers, eye-shadow palettes the size of tea-trays. Even before they left school it was as if they were already rehearsing for some witless kind of womanhood. — Alison Fell

Again Mosca felt she was up in the rafters, watching the mice. Little mouse, witless with fear. Running the wrong way. And here she was, just watching. Becoming a part of it by doing nothing. — Frances Hardinge

Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother. — Thomas Huxley

Sometimes the most consequential moments in my life originate from a state of completely witless human auto-pilot. — Tiffanie DeBartolo

I suffer for my art and despise the witless moneyed scoundrels who praise it. — El Greco

In primary school, I was bored witless by Australian history. — Catherine Jinks

Glasgow was home-made ginger biscuits and Jennifer Lawson dead in the park. It was the sententious niceness of the Commander and the threatened abrasiveness of Laidlaw. It was Milligan, insensitive as a mobile slab of cement, and Mrs Lawson, witless with hurt. It was the right hand knocking you down and the left hand picking you up, while the mouth alternated apology and threat. — William McIlvanney

It is the irony of this story that the one who scared me witless to start with was the very same who brought me peace, purpose, I dare say even wholeness. — Yann Martel

She suffers according to the digits
of my hate. I hear the filaments
of alabaster. I would lie down
with them and lift my madness
off like a wig. I would lie
outside in a room of wool
and let the snow cover me.
Paris white or flake white
or argentine, all in the washbasin
of my mouth, calling "Oh."
I am empty. I am witless.
Death is here. There is no
other settlement. — Anne Sexton

it grinned the foolish and charmingly witless grin of all dogs who had ever ridden shotgun in such a fashion. In — Dean Koontz

But, astonishingly, I'm not broken. I'm not destroyed. Terrified witless, shaking, retching with fear, yes. But no longer insecure. Because during my search for how you died, I somehow found myself to be a different person ... Living my life. And it wouldn't be my grief for you that toppled the mountain, but love. — Rosamund Lupton

humanity is populated by the couch critics, the apathetic advisors who, from a detached perch of safety, believe that every whim that breezes over their small minds, and every one of their witless arguments, ought to carry the same weight as the hard-won wisdom of those who are actually in the fight, whose minds have been sharpened with real-world experience, whose legends are being forged by action. — Brendon Burchard

I think it's fairly common for writers to be afflicted with two simultaneous yet contradictory delusions, the burning certainty that we're unique geniuses, and the constant fear that we're witless frauds who are speeding toward epic failure. — Scott Lynch

Could be off one of your own boats, Lavette," Whittier said. "The crab I mean." Whittier was hostile, contriving his hostility in witless remarks. Dan said nothing, only thinking that if this small, pompous, foolish man, so uninformed about the essence of his own business, was a measure of the hundred tycoons who ruled the hills of San Francisco, then his own way up would be none too difficult. It came down to money; if you had money, you functioned and you could do without guts or brains; and if you had money, you saw a girl like Jean Sheldon more than once, more than by accident. — Howard Fast

You ignorant little slug!" the Trunchbull bellowed. "You witless weed! You empty-headed hamster! You stupid glob of glue! — Roald Dahl

Dalton had expected it, he never failed to find it remarkable the way he had but to say a thing enough times, through enough people, and it became the popular truth, its provenance lost as it was mimicked by ordinary people who came to believe that it was their own idea - as if original thought routinely came forth from their witless minds of clay. — Terry Goodkind

He had never talked to her this way before, his soft voice underlaid with with steel. Amanda had no choice but to believe him. She wanted to rail and scream, her frustration escalating to an unbearable pitch. To her utter self-disgust, she found herself near tears, like the witless heroines of the sensation novels she had always enjoyed making jest of. Her mouth trembled as she struggled to control her explosive emotions.
Jack saw that sign of weakness, and something in his face relaxed. "Don't cry. There is no need for tears, mhuirnin," he said in a gentler tone. — Lisa Kleypas

It may be that you, my dear X, recognise something of yourself in these instances; a disposition to resistance, however slight, against arbitrary authority or witless mass opinion, or a thrill of recognition when you encounter some well-wrought phrase from a free intelligence. If so, let us continue to correspond so that I may draw from your experience even as you flatter me by asking to draw upon mine. For the moment, do bear in mind that the cynics have a point, of a sort, when they speak of the "professional nay-sayer." To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist. And there is no decent or charted way of making a living at it. It is something you are, and not something you do. — Christopher Hitchens

Behave like men, and not like witless sheep... — Dante Alighieri

With Stephen, I had become a sour, witless bore. With others, I could be light. Men I cared nothing about called me, and every once in a while, I accepted an invitation. On them my indifference worked like an aphrodisiac, Because I didn't want anything, I felt free an jabbered away spinning out all kinds of silliness that seemed only to augment their desire. — Siri Hustvedt

Why then should witless man so much misweene
That nothing is but that which he hath seene? — Edmund Spenser

Being a fan of authentic Dada, I find today's art - what I call 'Bankers' Dada' - mind-numbingly dull. The most challenging work I've seen of late is by The British Art Resistance. Their document, 'A Call for Heroes in an Age of Cowards', is apt in these days of witless chancers. — Billy Childish

April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone - never. — Franz Kafka

Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature. — Wallace Stegner

The witless destroy what they don't understand. — Loretta Chase

One can have a wit, but not a witless — Brandon Sanderson

I never understand why all of us are so stupid. All the time we nurse our spurious and witless ego, while looking deep down inside that we cannot live without talking to our loved ones. — Aakash Neeraj Mittal

She'd always thought that a broken heart sounded rather romantic. But in truth it was physical. Her whole chest ached, as if she'd been struck with a knife. With all her witless calculations about how to make a man desire her, she'd never realized that the most important thing was to make him like her. Or even love her. What a fool she was. — Eloisa James

To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore. And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets. — Roger Ebert

OF COURSE, SPACE travel isn't only about being stuffed into a claustrophobia-inducing cell, scared witless, trussed up in a restraint harness, and raped through every orifice for years on end. Because, you know, if that was all there was to it, there'd be a queue outside every travel agent. — Charles Stross

He did not wring his hands, as do
Those witless men who dare
To try to rear the changeling Hope
In the cave of black Despair. — Oscar Wilde

Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity - pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion. — H.G.Wells

And what are you that, missing you, I should be kept awake As many nights as there are days With weeping for your sake? And what are you that, missing you, As many days as crawl I should be listening to the wind And looking at the wall? I know a man that's a braver man And twenty men as kind, And what are you, that you should be The one man in my mind? Yet women's ways are witless ways, As any sage will tell, - And what am I, that I should love So wisely and so well? — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Boredom, as her mother had always told them, was a state to be pitied, the province of the witless. — Kate Morton

It seemed to him that he could hardly hear the sound of his own shrill voice: it was blown away from him by the willow-wind and drowned in a clamor of leaves, as soon as the words left his mouth. He felt desperate: lost and witless. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Students of media are persistently attacked as evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes rather than on 'substance'. The dramatic and rapid changes of 'substance' elude these accusers. Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view - the witless repetitive response to the unperceived. — Marshall McLuhan

Women are of two sorts. Some of them are wiser, better learned, discreeter, and more constant than a number of men. But another and a worse sort of them ... are fond, foolish, wanton, flibbergibs, tatlers, triflers, wavering, witless, without council, feeble, careless, rash, proud, dainty, nice, talebearers, eavesdroppers, rumor-raisers, evil-tongued, worse-minded, and in every way doltified with the dregs of the Devil's dunghill. — John Aylmer

I'd never seen the King of Cats fight before. He was suddenly everywhere, made of nothing but fangs and claws and fury, snarling like a chainsaw trying to sing opera. Our witless assassin never stood a chance. — Seanan McGuire

There isn't anything good to say about Kick-Ass 2, the even more witless, mirthless follow-up to Kick-Ass. — Manohla Dargis

Down, wanton, down! Have you no shame
That at the whisper of Love's name,
Or Beauty's, presto! up you raise
Your angry head and stand at gaze?

Poor bombard-captain, sworn to reach
The ravelin and effect a breach--
Indifferent what you storm or why,
So be that in the breach you die!

Love may be blind, but Love at least
Knows what is man and what mere beast;
Or Beauty wayward, but requires
More delicacy from her squires.

Tell me, my witless, whose one boast
Could be your staunchness at the post,
When were you made a man of parts
To think fine and profess the arts?

Will many-gifted Beauty come
Bowing to your bald rule of thumb,
Or Love swear loyalty to your crown?
Be gone, have done! Down, wanton, down! — Robert Graves

The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know. — Muriel Barbery

The truth can't hurt you, it's just like the dark. It scares you witless but with time you see things clear and stark — Elvis Costello

Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols. — Marshall McLuhan

All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling. — H.L. Mencken

This is the point where the knowing, irony-infused author laughs along with his readers about his time among the aphorisms, how he was once so gullible and needy that he drank deeply of such weak and fruity Kool-Aid. That's some other book. Slogans saved my life. All of them
the dumb ones, the preachy ones, the imperatives, the cliches, the injunctives, the gooey, Godly ones, the shameless, witless ones. — David Carr

So witless did these ideas strike me as being, so sweeping and pompous the way they were expressed, that I associated them immediately with literature. — Jorge Luis Borges

When most dullards hear the words 'the theater,' they envision a twelve-screen multiplex where disaster porn entertains the culturally witless for 90 minutes at a time. Pfaugh. The word 'theater' has grandeur. Power. Back to its ancient Grecian origins, it means 'the seeing place.' A stage upon which actors and actresses use fiction to show us truths. — Mark Waid

The moment our bodies hit, she fought like a caged tigress. She scratched, bit, kicked, and clawed. I landed a solid punch to her chin, knocking her witless for a few seconds. Those seconds were all that I needed. I steadied my gun and fired. As the stunned woman lay motionless, I pushed to my feet. Jaxon, Ghost, and Kittie all watched me expectantly. Lilla appeared distraught, as if I might attack her next, and Kyrin was shaking his head in exasperation. "Can you not go one day without using your fists?" he asked. — Gena Showalter

He roared at me furiously for ten minutes after he finally managed to put out the sulky and determined fire, calling me a witless muttonheaded spawn of pig farmers-"My father's a wood-cutter," I said- "adOf axe-swinging lummocks!" he snarled. — Naomi Novik

What's most troubling about this witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone-crunching violence is the increasing realization that it actually thinks it's saying something of significance. — Kenneth Turan

I'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in. — Marilyn Hacker

I was familiar with humans at this point only from afar, but even from there, I found them a pitiable species: scaleless, fangless, clawless, nearly furless, wingless, venomless, witless.
I honestly didn't understand how they had thrived so. — Patrick Jennings

Clever modern man is so witless that he thinks moral silence and empty conscience are an advantage. — Michael Leunig

A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures? — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Laugh and fear not, creatures. Now that you are no longer dumb and witless, you need not always be grave. For jokes as well as justice come in with speech. — C.S. Lewis

My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
An epic of the eyes
My love, with no disguise.
My truths are all foreknown,
This anguish self-revealed.
I'm naked to the bone,
With nakedness my shield.
Myself is what I wear:
I keep the spirit spare.
The anger will endure,
The deed will speak the truth
In language strict and pure.
I stop the lying mouth:
Rage warps my clearest cry
To witless agony. — Theodore Roethke

You like me witless?"
"Let's just say it evens the playing field a little. — Penny Reid

There is nothing in the world so dangerous, or so overwhelming as stupidity; perhaps there is no more of it now than there has been at any time, but I do not think the witless of past generations had so much power. The powers of darkness are the powers of misdirected knowledge. — Gwethalyn Graham

I shall not speak of my sufferings. Cowering deep down among them I feel nothing. It is there I die, unbeknown to my stupid flesh. That which is seen, that which cries and writhes, my witless remains. Somewhere in the turmoil thought struggles on, it too wide of the mark. It too seeks me, as it always has, where I am not to be found. — Samuel Beckett

Dark and silent and stale, I am no prey for them. I am far from the sounds of blood and breath, immured. I shall not speak of my sufferings. Cowering deep down among them I feel nothing. It is there I die, unbeknown to my stupid flesh. That which is seen, that which cries and writhes, my witless remains. Somewhere in this turmoil thought struggles on, it too wide of the mark. It too seeks me, as it always has, where I am not to be found. It too cannot be quiet. On others let it wreak its dying rage, and leave me in peace. — Samuel Beckett

Sport is the big giveaway. Wherever sport plays a big part in people's lives you can be sure they're bored witless and just waiting to break up the furniture. — J.G. Ballard

What's prayer? It's shooting shafts into the dark. What mark they strike, if any, who's to say? It's reaching for a hand you cannot touch. The silence is so fathomless that prayers like plummets vanish into the sea. You beg. You whimper. You load God down with empty praise. You tell him sins that he already knows full well. You seek to change his changeless will. Yet Godric prays the way he breathes, for else his heart would wither in his breast. Prayer is the wind that fills his sail. Else drift with witless tides. And sometimes, by God's grace, a prayer is heard. — Frederick Buechner

I am like my father - witless in matters of the heart, and of a poor way with women; yet the jewels that strew these royal garden paths - the trees, the flowers, the sward - all must have read the love that has filled my heart since first my eyes were made new by imaging your perfect face and form; so how could you alone have been blind to it? — Edgar Rice Burroughs

He couldn't believe it!
He knew her intent before she dove for her sgian dubh. But he couldn't react quickly enough. He wasn't about to allow her to arm herself again. He dropped his sword, needing both hands free and lunged for her, only with his body this time. Tackling her, he took her down, her back cushioned by the wealth of leaves, and planted his body on top of hers.
She grew very still then, and he smiled a little at her. "If you had done just as I asked, we wouldna be like this, now would we lassie?"
Sorcha was fuming mad and scared witless as the braw Highlander pressed his body on top of hers. She felt his staff growing against her belly the longer he remained between her legs. He was beautiful, his dark brown eyes swimming with lust, his long brown hair hanging about her face as she looked up at him, panting for breath, trembling, despite wishing to show he didn't frighten her one bit. But he did. — Terry Spear

But when a man has had only four hours' sleep he isn't sentimental. He sees things as they are: that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice; hideous, witless justice. — Albert Camus

He felt rather like someone lying in a bath after all the water has run out, witless, almost dead. — Malcolm Lowry

Now that I've found you, it scares me witless to think of anything happening. To you. I'm not used to being ... afraid." A sudden realization came to her, "So this is love," she said quietly. "The daily prospect of joy or disaster — Zoe Archer

I laugh triumphantly. "I've still got it. This beach is not cursed. We are free to have life changing conversations on here whenever we want without the fear that I'll turn witless. Life is good. I am once again the Lord of Words."
He smiles pityingly at me. "Walk don't run babe. You did use the words gigantic twat in your wedding proposal."
"Well, shit! — Lily Morton

The things we do when we expect our lives to continue are naturally and properly different than the things we might do if we expected them to end abruptly. We go easy on the lard and tobacco, smile dutifully at yet another of our supervisor's witless jokes, read books like this one when we could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub, and we do each of these things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become. — Daniel M. Gilbert

All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly which can - and must - be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a "perfect society" on any foundation other than "Women and children first!" is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly - and no doubt will keep trying. — Robert A. Heinlein

The key to contentedness is not the absence of work; neither is it to cap each day with the witless abandon of hollow entertainment, but to fill your days with that which fills your life with meaning. — Andrew Williams

Vulgar and obscene, the papers run rumors daily about people in show business, tales of wicked ways and witless affairs. — Carroll O'Connor

It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless Paraclete beleaguered with all limbo's clamor. — Cormac McCarthy

The dwarf slapped his flushed face so hard the crown flew from Joffrey's head. Then he shoved him with both hands and knocked him sprawling. "You blind bloody fool." "They were traitors," Joffrey squealed from the ground. "They called me names and attacked me!" "You set your dog on them! What did you imagine they would do, bend the knee meekly while the Hound lopped off some limbs? You spoiled witless little boy, you've killed Clegane and gods know how many more, and yet you come through unscratched. Damn you!" And he kicked him. — George R R Martin

There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt. — Mark Twain

For the rest, she grew used to the life that she was leading - used to the enormous sleepless nights, the cold, the dirt, the boredom, and the horrible communism of the Square. After a day or two she had ceased to feel even a flicker of surprise at her situation. She had come, like everyone about her, to accept this monstrous existence almost as though it were normal. The dazed, witless feeling that she had known on the way to the hopfields had come back upon her more strongly than before. It is the common effect of sleeplessness and still more of exposure. To live continuously in the open air, never going under a roof for more than an hour or two, blurs your perceptions like a strong light glaring in your eyes or a noise drumming in your ears. You act and plan and suffer, and yet all the while it is as though everything were a little out of focus, a little unreal. The world, inner and outer, grows dimmer till it reaches almost the vagueness of a dream. — George Orwell

Among other things I think humor is a shield, a weapon, a survival kit ... So here we are several billion of us, crowded into our global concentration camp for the duration. How are we to survive? Solemnity is not the answer, any more than witless and irresponsible frivolity is. I think our best chance lies in humor, which in this case means a wry acceptance of our predicament. We don't have to like it but we can at least recognize its ridiculous aspects, one of which is ourselves. — Ogden Nash

That there are a hundred with wit for one with understanding is a true proposition with which many witless Dummkopf consoles himself.The Dummkopf should also reflect that there also a hundred possessing neither wit nor understanding for every man possessing wit . — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Half-drunken poetry is the most honest kind of poetry. Too slurred to be eloquent, not slurred enough to be witless. — Sam Sykes

Here are the basic rules of LNTC, as I understood it:

Leave no evidence that you ever left the comfort of your bed to struggle through the woods with the sole intention of eating starch and beans and lying on your back on a rocky and downward-sloping campsite while you stare at the ceiling of your tent and listen to the sounds of a variety of carnivores as they rustle around outside. Leave no evidence that you are scared witless, that every movement terrifies you, even the most quiet scratching that you will realize in the morning must have been chipmunks. Leave no evidence that you are afraid you didn't dig your glory hole deep enough and that you used twice as much toilet paper as everyone else. Leave as little evidence as possible to indicate that you are the most incompetent camper to ever set foot on the trail.

Needless to say, it was my first time camping. — Erin Saldin

I would not like to live in a world without cathedrals. I need their beauty and grandeur. I need their imperious silence. I need it against the witless bellowing of the barracks yard and the witty chatter of the yes-men. I want to hear the rustling of the organ, this deluge of ethereal notes. I need it against the shrill farce of marches. — Pascal Mercier