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Wittily   /wˈɪtəli/   Listen
Wittily

adverb
1.
In a witty manner.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Wittily" Quotes from Famous Books



... 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 could be ejected only at a late hour. The outer door had no fastening to prevent ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... With Blondet, Lousteau and Nathan he was a habitue of the house of Esther Gobseck, rue Saint-Georges, in 1829, 1830. [Scenes from a Courtesan's Life.] In a private room of a well-known restaurant, in 1836, he wittily related to Finot, Blondet and Couture the source of Nucingen's fortune. [The Firm of Nucingen.] In January, 1837, his friend Lousteau had him come especially to upbraid him, Lousteau, on account of the latter's ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe

... eyes are blue," He continued wittily (When he said this it was new— Just come south from Italy); And she let her lids downfall (This was then original) At the marvel of it all— ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various

... He was witty and learned in many languages. One form which his humour took was the professed discovery of the originals in Latin, Greek, or mediaeval French of popular modern poems and songs. Many of these jeux d'esprit were coll. as Reliques of Father Prout. He wittily described himself as "an Irish potato seasoned with Attic salt." Latterly he acted as foreign correspondent to various newspapers, and d. at Paris reconciled ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin

... her eyes from the one to the other. "I doubt," she said, "this same poetical Master Tressilian, who is too learned, I warrant me, to remember whose presence he was to appear in, may be one of those of whom Geoffrey Chaucer says wittily, the wisest clerks are not the wisest men. I remember that Varney is a smooth-tongued varlet. I doubt this fair runaway hath had ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott

... unities, the fictions of the piece it would be an impertinence to break. The chapter of fascinations is very long. Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions. Society does not love its unmaskers. It was wittily, if somewhat bitterly, said by D'Alembert, "Un tat de vapeur tait un tat trs fcheux, parcequ'il nous faisait voir les choses comme elles sont." I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life. Children, youths, adults, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... from the Chief Secretaryship of Ireland he was offered a Viscounty, but declined the proffered distinction, wittily observing that as he was born a Duke he did not see why he should descend to a lower ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various

... whose inheritance was even greater than Ralph's had been, had also become a privileged person whose comings and goings and more reputable doings were often recorded in the newspapers. Ham had attained to what Gene Hollister aptly but inadvertently called "notoriety": as Ralph wittily remarked, Ham gave to polo and women that which might have gone into high finance. He spent much of his time in the East; his conduct there and at home would once have created a black scandal in our community, but we were gradually leaving our Calvinism behind us and growing more ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... expression has fallen into disuse, and even a Norse public, long accustomed to the wordy diffuseness of latter-day bards, have in part lost the faculty to comprehend the genius of their own language. As a Danish critic wittily observed: "Bjoernson's language is but one step ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... mechanical treatment of 'the pangs of despised love' or the joys of requited affection, did not escape the censure of contemporary criticism. The air soon rang with sarcastic protests from the most respected writers of the day. In early life Gabriel Harvey wittily parodied the mingling of adulation and vituperation in the conventional sonnet-sequence in his 'Amorous Odious Sonnet intituled The Student's Loove or Hatrid.' {106b} Chapman in 1595, in a series of sonnets entitled 'A Coronet for his mistress Philosophy,' appealed to his literary ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... Which girds a spacious town within its bound; It seems as if its summit touched the sky, And all appears like gold from top to ground. Here some one says it is but alchemy — And haply his opinion is unsound — And haply he more wittily divines: For me, I deem ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... followed, and very delightful nonsense it was, for Cyrilla possessed the happy gift of bright and easy letter-writing. She commented wittily on all the amusing episodes of the boarding-house life for the past month; she described a cat-fight she had witnessed from her window that morning and illustrated it by a pen-and-ink sketch of the belligerent felines; she described a lovely new dress her mother ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... drove through the square, the police with 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

... the same liberty of speech against Hecuba, whom she judgeth to be more worthy of punishment than herself for her adultery, because she was the mother of Paris that tempted her thereto. A young man therefore must not be accustomed to think anything of that nature handsomely or wittily spoken, nor to be pleased with such colorable inventions; but rather more to abhor such words as tend to the defence of wanton acts than ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... a mythical Widowers' Protective Foot-racing Society, and the town had great sport with the old boys whose names he used so wittily that it transcended impudence. Mehronay got up a long list of husbands who wiped dishes when the family was "out of a girl," as our people say, and organised them into a union to strike for their altars and their kitchen fires. When we ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White

... read this sonnet he highly commended the device of the shepherd, that could so wittily wrap his passions in a shadow, and so covertly conceal that which bred his chiefest discontent; affirming, that as the least shrubs have their tops, the smallest hairs their shadows, so the meanest swains had their fancies, and in their kind were as chary of love as a king. Whetted on with ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge

... the channel of banter or practical joke (giving pain while assuming the aspect of mere fun) rather than into a more serious and determined hostility. But my endeavours on this head were by no means uniformly successful, even when my plans were the most wittily concocted; for my namesake had much about him, in character, of that unassuming and quiet austerity which, while enjoying the poignancy of its own jokes, has no heel of Achilles in itself, and absolutely refuses to be laughed at. I ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... Very wittily remarked! my dear young lady, for your age.—I take you to be about seventeen, and I see by the compression of your pretty mouth that you consider yourself quite a judge and an authority. Only take care you ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty

... those noblemen who, having finished their training at court, return to live on their estates, and never suspect that they have, at the end of twenty years, grown rusty. Men of this type fail in tact with imperturbable coolness, talk folly wittily, distrust good with extreme shrewdness, and take incredible pains to fall ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac

... matter to create an empire as the result of an armed invasion of an unwilling land, it was quite another thing to organize it upon a permanent basis. As Prince Napoleon—familiarly known as Plon-Plon—very wittily remarked later, "One can do anything with bayonets, except sit upon them." ("On peut tout faire avec des baionnettes, excepte s'asseoir dessus.") For over two years Napoleon III endeavored to ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson

... noble animal," as a gentleman once wittily observed, when he found himself, for the first time in his life, in a position to make love; and we beg leave to repeat the remark—"the horse is a noble animal," whether we consider him in his usefulness or in his beauty; whether caparisoned in the chamfrein and demi-peake of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various

... 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

... the meeting of the States. The paltry convoy of Francis from Orleans to the royal vaults of St. Denis presented so unfavorable a contrast to the pompous ceremonial of his father's interment, that it was wittily said, "that the mortal enemy of the Huguenots had not been able to escape being himself buried like a Huguenot."[973] A bitter taunt aimed at the unfaithfulness and ingratitude of the Guises fell under their own eyes. A slip of paper was found pinned to the velvet funereal pall, on which ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... that wittily, handled the juggle of religion, and withal discover'd with what impudence and ignorance priests pretend to be inspir'd: But are not our wrangling pleaders possest with the same frenzy? who cant it? These wounds I receiv'd in defence of your liberty; this ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter

... seeing that prolixity of speech, when brevity is possible, is much less allowable to them; albeit (shame be to us all and all our generation) few ladies or none are left to-day who understand aught that is wittily said, or understanding are able to answer it. For the place of those graces of the spirit which distinguished the ladies of the past has now been usurped by adornments of the person; and she whose ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio

... often a little foolish, a little bored, because the uncovered faces are the natural objects of the maskers' impertinences, their part the rather barren amusement of trying to divine who it is endeavoring to intrigue, or puzzle, them, and wittily to parry personalities often more ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall

... he liked work, only when it could be made elegantly witty. In society he always awaited an opportunity to say something striking and took part in a conversation only when that was possible. His conversation was always sprinkled with wittily original, finished phrases of general interest. These sayings were prepared in the inner laboratory of his mind in a portable form as if intentionally, so that insignificant society people might carry them from drawing room to drawing room. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... report is that the Bank of France has suspended payment. The ruin of the Rothschilds is not true, though they are great losers by these catastrophes. The Provisional Government has very wisely and wittily devised, as a means of raising money, to lay a tax of six hundred francs a year upon everybody who keeps more than one servant! Can folly go ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... signify immediately one's course of action, Sidney Smith was not so far out of the way when he burlesqued the solemnity of the occasion, and the aversion that all dinner-givers have to an empty chair, when he wittily wrote: "A man should, if he die after having accepted an invitation to dinner, leave his executors a solemn charge to ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke

... the 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 ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... cannot argue profitably with my new friend I may be able to give him a useful hint. For though, as he wittily observes, he is still much older than I am, it is conceivable that I enjoy ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell

... 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 to wound carried off 'in pain and mortfication'. This ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman

... for me 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

... "a perpetual grin, like that of Horace, rather angers than amends a man." I cannot give him up the manner of Horace in low satire so easily. Let the chastisements of Juvenal be never so necessary for his new kind of satire, let him declaim as wittily and sharply as he pleases, yet still the nicest and most delicate touches of satire consist in fine raillery. This, my lord, is your particular talent, to which even Juvenal could not arrive. It is not reading, it is not ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden

... quite the rage at Bath among persons in high life to form parties to hear the different 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 ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... "Madam" (I wrote wittily), "I have no desire to exult over you, yet I should show a lamentable obtuseness to the irony of things were I not to dedicate this little work to you. For its inception was yours, and in your more ambitious ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie

... The wandering spirit had seized him. Paris and Leyden, with their learned lecturers, were but pretexts for travelling and fulfilling the long-cherished hope of seeing foreign lands. He thirsted for deep draughts of experience flowing from the hidden springs of unknown climes. Professor Masson wittily tells us that as Goldsmith had planned to go to Paris, of course he arrived in the end at Leyden. Having secured those necessary munitions of war which to the full extent of his means Uncle Contarine unfailingly provided, Goldsmith ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland

... world was made for the field of German operations, and whoever placed himself in opposition to the accomplishment of this destiny was for every German the object of surprise."] The view is not new; the feeling of surprise at opposition was expressed wittily by a French poet in ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... How wittily would he mistake your meaning, and put in a conceit most seasonably out of season. His talk without affectation was compressed, like his beloved Elizabethans, even unto obscurity. Like grains of fine gold, his sentences would beat out into whole sheets. He had small mercy on spurious ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde

... time since I wrote!—I'm a sad naughty girl— Though, like a tee-totum, I'm all in a twirl, Yet even (as you wittily say) a tee-totum Between all its twirls gives a LETTER to note 'em. But, Lord, such a place! and then, Dolly, my dresses, My gowns, so divine!—there's no language expresses, Except just the TWO words "superbe," "magmfique," ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... This title was wittily given by an editor of this city to the ideal woman demanded in "Woman in the Nineteenth Century." We do not object to it, thinking it is really desirable that women should grow beyond the average size which has been prescribed ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... was also bitter 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 invalid ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... Concertos of Prenk Bib Doda in C sharp minor, and of Basil Tulkinghorn in the composite key of F.E. The latter work, we may explain, is dedicated to Lord BIRKENHEAD. Doda's work is so rarely played that Mr. ERNEST NEWMAN has wittily suggested that he ought to be renamed Dodo. But let that pass. Here he is abundantly like himself, rich in self-determining phrases which emerge from a Hinterland of wild surmise, and tower aloft in peaks of Himalayan majesty ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various

... not fettered and your wings clipped. They wish to preserve to you love's delusion, because you are a favorite, and deny you the object adored. Beware of the institution which the French actress, Sophie Arnould, has so wittily called the 'consecration of adultery.' You will agree with me that we have many such little sacraments in our dear Weimar, and I must laugh when I reflect for what purpose those amiable beauties have married, as not one of ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach

... such as these:—"L'art de faire, des amours, et de les conserver ensuite"; "Les amours des pretres"; "L'Archeveque de Paris avec Madame la duchesse de Berry"; and a thousand similar absurdities which, however, are often very wittily written. One cannot but be astonished at the means people here make use of to earn ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... man's heart, savors of 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 misapprehended facts, but, if he had flourished in the Middle Ages he would have been ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge

... nearly kin to him morally than I had ever felt before. There was a squint-eyed shrewdness in the way he involved and disposed of the Presiding Elder that was wittily familiar to me, and all the more diverting because William never suspected the Machiavellian character of his conduct. He kept his eye on God, as usual, letting not his soul's right hand know what ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris

... fully restoring every connection existing under the Constitution between the States and the National Government. Viewed merely as a theory it was perfect. The danger was that in the test of actual practice it might end like so many similar experiments in other countries. An opponent wittily characterized it as Government by diagram, accurately drawn on an ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... his resurrection he became the Judge of all men. Once a year the Egyptians used to celebrate his death, mourning his slaying by the evil one: "this grief for the death of Osiris did not escape some ridicule; for Xenophanes, the Ionian, wittily remarked to the priests of Memphis, that if they thought Osiris a man they should not worship him, and if they thought him a God they need not talk of his death and suffering.... Of all the gods Osiris alone had a place of birth and a place of burial. His birthplace ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant

... Rev. Elias Nason wittily says of "The Bay Psalm-Book," "Welde, Eliot, and Mather mounted the restive steed Pegasus, Hebrew psalter in hand, and trotted in warm haste over the rough roads of Shemitic roots and metrical psalmody. Other divines rode behind, and after cutting and ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle

... my Dreams should come forth alone, being grown by means of the Gloss (running continually in manner of a Paraphrase) full as great as my Calendar. Therein be some things excellently, and many things wittily discoursed of E. K., and the pictures so singularly set forth and portrayed, as if Michael Angelo were there, he could (I think) nor amend the best, nor reprehend the worst. I know you would like them ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... wall. There were Romeo and Juliet, Antwerp from the river, Enfield's ships among the ice, and the huge huntsman winding a huge horn; mingled with them a few new ones, the thin crop of a succeeding generation, not better and not worse. It was to one of these I was directed; a thing coarsely and wittily handled, mostly with the palette-knife, the colour in some parts excellent, the canvas in others loaded with mere clay. But it was the scene, and not the art or want of it, that riveted my notice. The foreground ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... laughing with all his might. I saw all the sad results which might arise from his speech, and nevertheless, while reproaching M. d'Orleans, I could not help laughing myself, so well, so simply; and so wittily expressed was his ridicule of the government on this and the other side ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon

... awaiting their lord's appearance in his public apartments, where, suitably attired, they stand ready to serve him and execute any orders he may choose to give them; but if the lord have no command for them, they are expected to maintain the conversation as wittily and agreeably as they can, or to play cards. They must also accompany him in his walks, rides, drives, and visits, defend him on all difficult occasions, always give him their votes at the dietines, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... later Miss Casey was standing up with Mr. Patsy Moffat for the grand march of the grand ball of the Jolly Fellows' Pleasure Club of the Fourteenth Ward, held at the Palace Garden. The band was just starting the "Boulanger March," and Mr. Moffat was saying wittily that it was warm enough to eat ice, when Mr. Hefty Burke shouldered in between him and Miss Casey. He was dressed in his best suit of clothes, and ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis

... upon the above extracts, it may be stated that the blending of the races is not a burning question. "It can keep," as Mr. Bright wittily said with regard to a subject of similar urgency. Time and Nature might safely be left uninterfered with to work out whatever social development of this kind is in store for ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas

... inquiries yourself just now... I assure you these interrogations are sometimes more embarrassing for the interrogator than for the interrogated.... You made the observation yourself just now very aptly and wittily." (Raskolnikov had made no observation of the kind.) "One gets into a muddle! A regular muddle! One keeps harping on the same note, like a drum! There is to be a reform and we shall be called by a different name, at least, he-he-he! And as for our ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... from a valued and kind correspondent (not one of those emphatically good-natured friends so wittily described by Sheridan) the following temperate remonstrance against the tone which has distinguished several of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various

... that for the present season he had rented a corner of the wagon as a book-store, which, as he wittily observed, was a true circulating library, since there were few parts of the country where it had not gone its rounds. I approved of the plan exceedingly, and began to sum up within my mind the many uncommon felicities in the life of a book-pedler, especially when his character resembled that of ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... 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 a great and ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson

... was certainly his rival. Nay, on not a few occasions—I am almost ashamed to mention it—he actually defeated him. However this may be, you will certainly find his works full of humour: the plots are full of wittily contrived intrigue, the denouements clear, the characters suited to the situations, the words true to life, the jests never unworthy of true comedy, the serious passages never quite on the level ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius

... wittily,—I think it was Mrs. Howe,—"Man carves his destiny; woman is helped to hers." Women have been kept so long in this state of dependence, that their characters have become dwarfed. The thirst for excitement that drives ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various

... 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

... decorated with palms, inscriptions, and tears as cold as the stones on which sorrowing hearts had caused to be carved their regrets and coats of arms. Many good words are there engraved in black letters, epigrams reproving the curious, concetti, wittily turned farewells, rendezvous given at which only one side appears, pretentious biographies, glitter, rubbish and tinsel. Here the floriated thyrsus, there a lance-head, farther on Egyptian urns, now and then a few cannon; on all sides the emblems of professions, and every style ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... wittily said that only those in their anecdotage should tell stories. De Quincey wanted all story-tellers to be submerged in a horse-pond, or treated in the same manner as mad dogs. But story-telling has its legitimate and appropriate use, and if ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser

... paramour of three queens, trembled before the simple eloquence of a feeble and imprisoned Jew.[29] These men became proverbial for their insolence and wealth; and once, when Claudius was complaining of his own poverty, some one wittily replied, "that he would have abundance if two of his freedmen would but admit him into partnership ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... learned for twenty- two hundred years, every brisk young man, who says in succession fine things to each reluctant generation,—Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Alfieri, Coleridge,—is some reader of Plato, translating into the vernacular, wittily, his good things. Even the men of grander proportion suffer some deduction from the misfortune (shall I say?) of coming after this exhausting generalizer. St. Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg, Goethe, are likewise his debtors, and must say after him. For it is fair to credit the ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... Prof. von 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 ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... up the expensive suite at the Waldorf that very day and returned to Hanging Rock. They alternated between silence and the coarsest, crudest quarrelings, for neither had the intelligence to quarrel wittily or the refinement to quarrel artistically. As soon as they arrived at the Gower house, Mildred was ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips

... us all over for tatters and incongruities. A laugh was ready at their lips; but they were too well-mannered to indulge it in our hearing. Wait a bit, till they were all back in the saloon, and then hear how wittily they would depict the manners of the steerage. We were in truth very innocently, cheerfully, and sensibly engaged, and there was no shadow of excuse for the swaying elegant superiority with which these damsels passed among us, or for the stiff and waggish glances of their ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... childlike remains of old German pictures and statuary were exhumed and set up as worthy of imitation; in the other, we have carried out in art, in costume, and in domestic life, so far as possible, what has been wittily and accurately described as "stained-glass attitudes." With all its peculiar vagaries, the English school is essentially a copy of the German, in its return to mediaevalism. The two movements have a further likeness, in that they are found ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... monuments and the loss of life and property thereby occasioned, were as yet fresh in the memories of the inhabitants, and they needed no such reminder of the new state of things. Their better feelings towards Germany had been bombarded out of them, as an Alsacienne wittily observed to the Duchess of Baden after the surrender. The duchess, daughter to the Emperor William, made the round of the hospitals, and not a single Alsatian soldier but turned his face to the wall, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... amount with their 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, David ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller

... to that great flock of ninnies who subscribed to the "Constitutionnel," and was much concerned about "refusals to bury." He adored Voltaire, though his preferences were really for Piron, Vade, and Colle. Naturally, he admired Beranger, whom he wittily called the "grandfather of the religion of Lisette." His daughters, Madame Camusot and Madame Protez, and his two sons would, to use a popular expression, have been flabbergasted if any one had explained to them what their father meant by "singing ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac

... severe emotions on the subject of individuality in art, and does not hesitate to express himself forcibly with reference to those who are content to degrade the names of their ancestors by turning out what he wittily describes as "so much of ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah

... indifferent New York, one felt a certain lilt and go, a touch of nature among the fool's fabric of the melodrama, which set the action far above our steady practitioners in the same art of sinking. And, above all, a sense of parody pierced through words and actions, commenting wittily on the nonsense of romance which so many were so willing to take seriously. She was a live thing, defiantly and gaily conscious of every absurdity with which she indulged the babyish tastes of ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... have managed the business carefully and written most wittily. So I think I won't buy. For there is enough salt and not ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... concerning the last and fatal voyage of my dear friends Sir F. Drake and Sir John Hawkins, who rest in peace, having finished their labors, as would God I rested. To whose shameless and unspeakable lying my good friend Mr. Henry Savile of this county did most pithily and wittily reply, stripping the ass out of his lion's skin; and Sir Thomas Baskerville, general of the fleet, by my advice, send him a cartel of defiance, offering to meet him with choice of weapons, in any indifferent kingdom of equal distance from this realm; which challenge ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... storks are similar to those of M. Sucre, with the inevitable little rocks, or little butterflies eternally the same. The least of these illuminators, with his insignificant eyeless face, possesses at his fingers' ends the maximum of dexterity in this art of decoration, light and wittily incongruous, which threatens to invade us in France, in this epoch of imitative decadence, and which has become the great resource of our manufacturers of ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti

... Albertinelli passed off his pseudo-hostdom with bravado, talking very wittily about it, the artistic vein was too strong within him to be subdued; he soon gave up the flask and returned to the brush, for in 1509, when his quondam pupil, Francia Bigio, was busy at the Servi, we again find Mariotto's ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)

... running from studies of those filthy writings loose upon London; it was as natural as dunghill steam. Temple pretended he was forced by the captain's undue severity to defend Venus; he said, I thought rather wittily, 'Sailors ought to have a respect for her, for she was born in the middle of the sea, and she steered straight for land, so she must have had a pretty good idea ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... 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 ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes

... he had frequently been harsh and self-assertive in his judgment of others; but in his latter years he learned that kindness is always more fruitful than wrath. Sitting in his easy chair and smoking his long pipe, he talked frankly and often wittily with the many who came to visit him. Thus Bishop H. Martensen, the theologian, tells us that his conversation was admirably eloquent and interspersed with wit and humor. And a prominent Swedish author, P. Wisselgren, writes: "Some ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg

... same in every instance. Moreover, education and habit give us each a second nature which often has more control over us than the original one. In the society in which Madame de Sevigne lived, people made a point of speaking wittily. The first few times one appeared in this society, it required a little study and effort to assume the same tone as the rest. One had to be on the watch for those pleasant repartees that, among the frequenters of the Rambouillet and Richelieu houses, gave the new-comer a good reputation; ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... 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 ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... to speak in favour of the works by which it was proposed to control the inundations of the Tiber, and it was curious to hear it said on all sides that, of course, the Tiber works must be taken in hand as Garibaldi wished it. Pius IX. summed up the situation wittily in the remark: 'Lately we were two here; now we are three.' The old hero invoked the day when bayonets might be turned into pruning-hooks, but he by no means thought that it had arrived, and in the meanwhile he urged the Italians to look to their ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

... on the noblest figures of young men and maidens, quite powerless and melancholy. It would not rake or pitch a ton of hay; it would not rub down a horse; and the men and maidens it left pale and hungry. A political orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads, which opened stately enough, with planted trees on either side to tempt the traveller, but soon became narrow and narrower and ended in a squirrel-track and ran up a tree. ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... sniggering. In the meantime everybody smoked hard and drank punch harder. During occasional short pauses in Fullbil's remarks, gentlemen passed ecstatic comments one to another.—"Ah, this is indeed a mental feast!"—"Did ye ever hear him talk more wittily?"—"Not I, faith; he surpasses even himself!"—"Is it not a blessing to sit at table with such a master of learning and wit?"—"Ah, these are the times to ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane

... know. (Rising wittily to the occasion.) But how can I watch and pray when I am asleep? Isn't that ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw

... because you are part of the mob; because the one blind, automatic thought in the mob-mind just now is to feed me. And where does Martin Eden and the work Martin Eden performed come in in all this? he asked himself plaintively, then arose to respond cleverly and wittily to a clever and ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... wittily remarked, are born with the mania of annexation. It runs in their blood. And it is not merely territory, or political influence, or the world's markets that they seek to appropriate. Their appetite extends to everything in the present ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon

... 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 ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... of the component parts of a Body, Nature is able to effect as great Changes in a parcell of Matter reputed similar, as those requisite to Denominate one of the Tria Prima. And though Helmont do somewhere wittily call the Fire the Destructor and the Artificial Death of Things; And although another Eminent Chymist and Physitian be pleas'd to build upon this, That Fire can never generate any thing but Fire; Yet You will, I doubt not, be of another mind, If You consider how many new sorts of mixt Bodies ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle

... constitution but a written document which he could fold up and put in his pocket, or file away in a pigeon-hole. The Abbe Sieyes pronounced politics a science which he had finished, and he was ready to turn you out constitutions to order, with no other defect than that they had, as Carlyle wittily says, no feet, and could not go. Many in the last century, and some, perhaps, in the present, for folly as well as wisdom has her heirs, confounded the written instrument with the constitution itself. No constitution can be written on paper or engrossed on parchment. What the convention ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson

... unhonored as few bad popes have ever been. On his tomb the cardinals wrote: "Here lies Adrian VI whose supreme misfortune in life was that he was called upon to rule." A like judgment was expressed more wittily by the people, who erected a monument to Adrian's physician and labeled ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... these exhausted pupils is often broken, by what has been wittily called a "panorama on the brain," in which the worries, excitements, dissipations of the day, are incessantly repeated, and they rise late, more wearied than they went ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... then one man opened a spigot in the rear of the barrel, and at the same time the other elevated the shafts in a clever manner, inducting the jet d'eau to hit one of the tubs. One tub filled, we switched the stream wittily to the next. To fill the three tubs (they were not always all of them empty) required as many as six or eight delightful trips. After which one entered the cuisine and got ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings

... the marchioness ran wittily over various topics until coffee was brought in. Then, addressing herself to me, she told me to sit down, just as if she was bestowing ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... 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 flag; ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale

... and sufficiently told, but in order to present the old story in a new light, to show how the lady might have been right and the knight wrong, in spite of King Francis's verdict and the look of things. The tale, which is very wittily told, and contains some fine serious lines on the lion, is supposed to be related by Peter Ronsard, in the position of on-looker and moraliser; and the character of the narrator, after the poet's manner, is brought out by many cunning little touches. The ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... the Sympathetic Powder, Professor DE MORGAN wittily argues that it must have been quite efficacious. He says: "The directions were to keep the wound clean and cool, and to take care of diet, rubbing the salve on the knife or sword. If we remember the dreadful notions upon ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove

... and the rest of her person enveloped in a pelisse, whose many rents betrayed its long service. In this strange dress she traversed the streets of Paris in search of adventures. She was going, she said, wittily enough, "to return to the cits what her father and brother had so frequently robbed them of." Chance having led her steps to the rue St. Martin, she was stopped there by a confusion of carriages, ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon

... if I said that, it would sound witty. Why can't you say it wittily? What on earth is the matter with you? Why don't you inspire ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw

... supplemented after a fashion by the young girl Puss. She carried coffee and tea back and forth among the boarders, but she made pleasure excursions rather than business ones in this way, to speak strictly. She made jokes with various people. She chaffed the young men pleasantly and wittily, as she supposed, and as the rest also supposed, apparently, judging by the applause and laughter which she got by her efforts. Manifestly she was a favorite with most of the young fellows and sweetheart of the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... Cochelet has 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 same before ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach

... them. This was the 28th Brigade. The 8th and 19th Brigades, starting later, were to make a frontal attack at 4 a.m.; our brigade were to enfilade the Turk when bolted; and these united efforts were to drive him into the dead ground by the river, and there, as the scheme wittily put it, our artillery and machine-guns would 'deal with him.' Whoever drew up the plan was not only bloody-minded but oblivious of long experience, assuming thus that John was ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson

... 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 ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham

... understood not how to live." What an authority is here for the credit of retreat! and 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 to have company on either side, but it delights ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley

... simple is because the alto players as a rule were technically less skillful. As a general thing they were violinists who had failed—'the refugees of the G clef,' as Edouard Colonne, the eminent conductor, once wittily said. But the reason modern French composers give the viola special attention is because France now is ahead of the other nations in virtuose viola playing. It is practically the only country which may be said to have a 'school' of viola playing. In the Smetana quartet the viola plays a most ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens

... worn clean out of use, which I do not disallow, so it be done with judgment. Some others would ampliate and enrich their native tongue with more vocables, which also I commend, if it be aptly and wittily assayed. So that if any other do innovate and bring up to me a word afore not used or not heard, I would not dispraise it: and that I do attempt to bring it into use, another man should not cavil at."[296] George Pettie also defends ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos

... party was a marked success throughout. Even the two young girls were satisfied, for Constance contrived the appearance of several stalwart youths of the neighborhood to help her son leaven the group of older men. Mrs. Thayer flirted pleasantly and wittily with whoever chanced to be at hand, Mr. Elliot hobnobbed with Farraday and made touchingly laborious efforts to be frivolous, and McEwan kept the household laughing at his gambols, heavy as those ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... a 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. ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Hawkesworth did not adduce a similar instance of negligence, in a certain Northern Capital. The English, not much averse, at the time of the publication, to depreciate and despise their neighbours, would certainly have relished it vastly—for, as Swift somewhere wittily observes, your men of nice taste have very filthy ideas. That the city alluded to has improved much, within the last half century, is but to lump it with almost all the other cities and towns in Britain, of which the same thing may be predicated. Still, however, it is ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... the beasts in Nineveh, and a little squat monkey, developing into a devil, is wittily characterized by Ruskin as reversing the ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... de Rochefide paid little attention to him. Mademoiselle des Touches having started the topic of her journey to Italy she related, very wittily, many of its incidents, which made Claude Vignon, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... partner was Roger P. de la S-, the most Scandinavian- looking of Provencal squires, fair, and six feet high, as became a descendant of sea-roving Northmen, authoritative, incisive, wittily scornful, with a comedy in three acts in his pocket, and in his breast a heart blighted by a hopeless passion for his beautiful cousin, married to a wealthy hide and tallow merchant. He used to take us to lunch at their house without ceremony. ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad

... was wittily and happily expressed by a friend, who had some lottery puffs, which he had been employed to write, returned on his hands for their too great severity of thought and classical terseness of style, and who observed on that occasion, that ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... which I go is not one where you can be received." "You jest, sir," said he; "if your friends have invited you to a feast, what should prevent you from allowing me to go with you? You will please them, I am sure, by introducing to them a man who can talk wittily like me, and knows how to divert company. But say what you will, I ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous

... York falling vacant, His Majesty being at a loss for a fit person to appoint to the exalted situation, asked the opinion of the Rev. Dr. Mountain, who had raised himself by his remarkable facetious temper to the See of Durham. The Dr. wittily replied. 'Hadst thou faith, thou wouldst say to this mountain (at the same time laying his hand on his breast) be removed and cast into the sea (see).' His Majesty laughed heartily, and forthwith conferred the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... hundred pleasant Nouels. Wittily discoursed, betweene seuen Honourable Ladies, and three Noble Gentlemen. The last Fiue Dayes. London, Printed ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg

... ground that our Bible is directly inspired? Well, inspiration, as Sir William Davenant observed and rather wittily proved, in his Preface to "Gondibert," 'is a dangerous term.' It is dangerous mainly because it is a relative term, a term of degrees. You may say definitely of some things that the writer was inspired, as you may certify ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... little risky, but it was so funnily narrated that everyone roared but Arthur, who remained in perfect silence. Margaret had been drinking glass after glass of wine, and no sooner had her husband finished than she capped his story with another. But whereas his was wittily immoral, hers was simply gross. At first the other women could not understand to what she was tending, but when they saw, they looked down awkwardly at their plates. Arbuthnot, Haddo, and the other man who was there laughed very ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham

... was a trained diplomat, with delightful manners and extraordinary strength of character. Another important aid in the Belgian relief work was the Mexican Charge d'Affaires Senor don German Bulle. Hugh Gibson, secretary of the American Legation, wittily described this gentleman as the "representative of a country without a government to a government without a country." The businessman in the American Legation was this secretary. Mr. Gibson had the appearance of a typical Yankee, though he came from Indiana. ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... well; It wets my foot, but prettily It chills my life, but wittily, It is not disconcerted, It is not broken-hearted: Well used, it decketh joy, Adorneth, doubleth joy: Ill used, it will destroy, In perfect time and measure With a face of golden ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... than twenty days he had no strength to move or lift his hands. Not a word of impatience escaped his lips; and when Acquapendente began to medicate the worst wound in his face, he moved the dozen doctors to laughter by wittily observing, 'And yet the world maintains that it was given Stilo Romanae Curiae.'[145] His old friend Malipiero would fain have kept the dagger as a relic. But Sarpi suspended it at the foot of a crucifix in the church ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... 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 ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... had made celebrities. Do I not pleasantly remember the jolly haymaking, when old Jerdan, calling out, "More hay, more hay!" covered Grace Greenwood with a haycock overturned, and had greeted a sculptor guest appropriately and wittily enough with "Here we are, Durham, all mustered!" the "we" being besides others, Camilla Toulmin, George Godwin, and Francis Bennoch? Do I not remember how much surprised we were at the melodies whereof an old piano ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... appearance, moulded into the shape of a rampant bear, which the owner regarded with a look of mingled reverence, pride, and delight, that irresistibly reminded Waverley of Ben Jonson's Tom Otter, with his Bull, Horse, and Dog, as that wag wittily denominated his chief carousing cups. But Mr. Bradwardine, fuming towards him with complacency, requested him to observe this curious ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... get the miscegenation controversy into Congress. The book, with its indorsements, was brought to the notice of Mr. Cox, of Ohio (commonly called "Sunset Cox;") and he made an earnest speech on the subject. Mr. Washburne replied wittily, reading and commenting on extracts from a work by Cox, in which the latter deplored the existence of the prejudice against the Africans. A few days after, Mr. Kelly, of Pennsylvania, replied very elaborately to Mr. Cox, bringing all his learning and historical research to bear on ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum

... the sanctity of womanhood? and, if so, can it be doubted that it is an inheritance from those wild child-hearted Vikings, who were first among the peoples of Europe to conceive woman as the chosen vessel of the divine? And how wittily true, by the way, how slily significant, was both the Norse and the Greek conception of the ruling destinies of man, the Norns and ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne

... man of fifty, very much occupied, a politician and doctor, and he promised to introduce me to all the scholars whose interests I shared. As I felt scruples at taking up these gentlemen's time, he exclaimed wittily: "My dear fellow, take up their time! To take his time is the greatest service you can render to a Roman; he never knows what to do ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... fatuity, of his outward deportment, combined with the power which there was within, brings to our recollection some part of the character of La Fontaine, whom a French lady wittily called the Fable Tree, from his apparent unconsciousness, or rather want of mental responsibility for the admirable productions which he was continually supplying. His propriety and clearness, when he expresses his thoughts with his pen, and his confusion and inability ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... charmingly to his 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 ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac

... rare exceptions, been the most indebted to their predecessors or to their contemporaries. It has wittily been remarked that only mediocrity is ever wholly original. Impressionability is one of the conditions of the creative faculty: the sensitive mind is the only mind that invents. What the poet reads, sees, and feels, goes into his blood, and ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... was another settler in Alexandria. He followed Strato at the head of one of the schools in the museum. He was very successful in bringing up the young men, who needed, he used to say, modesty and the love of praise, as a horse needs bridle and spur. His eloquence was so pleasing that he was wittily called Glycon, or the sweet. Carneades of Cyrene at the same time held a high place among philosophers; but as he had removed to Athens, where he was at the head of a school, and was even sent to Rome as the ambassador of the Athenians, we must not claim the whole honour of him for ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... himself out to be fascinating, and was fascinating. There was a subtle charm in his handsome face, in his brilliant smile and glance, in his pleasant voice, in his wittily-told stories, and inexhaustible fund of anecdote and mimicry. Now he was in Ireland, now in France, now in Scotland, now in Yorkshire; and the bad English and the patois and accent of all were imitated to the life. With that face, that voice, that talent for imitation, Lieutenant ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming

... Plato is to him the 'exhaustive generalizer,' beyond whom it is folly to aspire, and by whose stature he measures the nations. Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, are only brisk young men translating into the vernacular wittily his good things. St. Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg also 'say after him.' Emerson either addresses men whose ignorance he greatly exaggerates, or else the ideal men of some centuries hence. His mission is to the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... to break the treasury," said Otto; and he sketched to her briefly, wittily, with here and there a touch of pathos, the story of his visit to the farm, of his promise to buy it, and of the refusal with which his demand for money had been met that morning at the council; concluding with a few ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... broad-shouldered, merry-faced man, with thick grey hair rose on the platform. "Who is that?" I inquired of my next neighbor. With a look of surprise that I should ask such a question in Birmingham, he said: "It is John Angell James." He was the man whom Dr. Cox wittily described as "An angel vinculated between two Apostles." He spoke very forcibly, in a hearty, humorous vein, and I could hardly understand how such a jovial old gentleman could be the author of such a serious work as "The Anxious Inquirer." But ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... (1801-1857), known as Shepherd Smith, was a socialist and a mystic, with a philosophy that was wittily described as "Oriental pantheism translated into Scotch." He ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan

... susceptibility and pride which others, less sincere in the pursuit of a definite reconciliation, certainly do not possess. Sadly I have followed the cavalcade of the Prince of Naples to Metz. I can find no joy in the words of King Humbert, which M. Gaston Calmette has reproduced so wittily and with such good nature, in the Figaro. From my point of view, both these actions of the King of Italy were inspired by William II; and both had the same object in view, viz. to prove at Metz that he could ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam

... fancy are very brilliant, the picture becomes highly interesting; if her images are systematically and rightly combined, and truthfully rendered, it will become even impressive and instructive; if wittily and curiously combined, it will be ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... S. Iohn the Baptist his day, to speake the truth constantly, and to suffer for the same patiently. Thus in stedfastnes of faith and godlinesse of life (non legere modo sed degere sanctorum vitas, as [n]one wittily) to bee followers of them as they were followers of Christ; is (as [o]blessed Latymer was wont to say) the right worshipping of Saints, and of God in ...
— An Exposition of the Last Psalme • John Boys

... of 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 ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... upon some projected improvement of the streets of Edinburgh, the Dean of Faculty wittily said that the forwardness of the clergy, and the backwardness of the medical faculty, had spoiled the finest street in Europe, alluding to the projection of the colonnade of St. Andrew's church and the recession of ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various

... Athos, and D'Artagnan—how I loved you, and your immortal squires, Planchet, Grimaud, Mousqueton! How well and wittily you spoke the language I adored—better even than good Monsieur Lallemand, the French master at Bluefriars, who could wield the most irregular subjunctives as if they had been mere feathers—trifles light ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al

... Peel it was wittily said that when Chief Secretary he went through the country on an outside car, which made him take a one-sided view of the ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey

... open window of the drawing-room. In so far as he saw Maggie at all, he saw her somehow mysteriously elegant and vivacious He did not see his father. His fancy had little relation to reality. But this did not mar his pleasure... Then he saw himself talking over the hedge, wittily, to amiable and witty persons in ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... again. For where the one perchance may bend it, the other shall surely break it: and so, instead of some hope, leave an assured desperation, and shameless contempt of all goodness; the furthest point in all mischief, as Xenophon doth most truly and most wittily mark. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... the whole community all the wholesome necessaries and comforts of life,"[351] and Bax thinks that "In a perfectly organised Socialist State men never worked more than two or three hours a day."[352] Yves Guyot wittily says: "There is no reason why their demands should not go further. Zero alone can bid them defiance."[353] It is worth noting that many Anarchists also promise a great lessening of the hours of labour when the State has been destroyed. Kropotkin, for instance, requires ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker



Words linked to "Wittily" :   witty



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