Wit Delights
Wit discerns occult connections
Excerpted from A Whirld of Words: A Reader’s Commonplace Dictionary.
You will find the WORKS CITED below.
wit
the weightinesse of the depe-witted sir Thomas Wyat
Richard Tottel (Wyatt 1963) p. xxxv; (Tottel et al. 1965) p. 2
some say there be two main defects of wit, error and ignorance, to which all others are reduced; by ignorance we know not things necessary, by error we know them falsely. Ignorance is a privation, error a positive act. From ignorance comes vice, from error, heresy, etc
(Burton 1924) p. 21
Many, affecting wit beyond their power,
Have got to be a dear fool for an hour
(Herbert 2015) p. 17
usefulness comes by labor, wit by ease
(Herbert 2015) p. 19
less judgment than wit, is more sail than ballast
(Penn 1993) p. 39
wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance, or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures in the fancy. Judgment, on the contrary, lies in separating carefully one from another, ideas, wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude
John Locke (DeMaria 1986) p. 99
that which has been often thought, but was never before so well expressed
Pope (Johnson 1955) v.1, p. 13
Lessing's wit was no little French spaniel chasing its own shadow; it was more like a great German tomcat playing with a mouse before strangling it
(Heine 1959) p. 97
wit, rigorously and philosophically considered is a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike
(Johnson 1955) v.1, p. 14
doth any wise man think, that wit resteth in strange words?
Robert Cawdrey (Stamper 2017) p. 70
to discover relationships and similarities between things that no one else sees. Wit can in this way lead to invention
(Lichtenberg 2000) p. 126
equivalent to imagination, fancy, genius, combined with learning, and showing itself in the discovery of subtle analogies, resemblances
(Grierson 1921) p. 239
wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit. It is like ice, on which no beauty of form, no majesty of carriage can plead any immunity – they must walk gingerly, according to the laws of ice, or down they must go, dignity and all
(Emerson 1977) p. 208
the apparent lack of any relation between two ideas and the subsequent establishment of an intellectually convincing link between them, that pleases
(Freeman 1966) p. 3
the faculty that makes for metaphor by the perception of likeness in unlike things
(Deutsch 1962)
LINK to the Introduction to A Whirld of Words: A Reader’s Commonplace Dictionary.
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WORKS CITED
Burton, Robert (1924), The Anatomy of Melancholy: What it is with all the kinds causes symptoms prognostics (London: Chatto & Windus) xviii, [2], 747.
DeMaria, Robert (1986), Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press) xii, 303.
Deutsch, Babette (1962), Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms (New York: Grossett and Dunlap) 181.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1977), The Portable Emerson (New York: Penguin Books) vi, 664.
Freeman, Rosemary (1966), English Emblem Books (New York: Octagon Books) xiv, 256.
Grierson, Herbert John Clifford (1921), Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: The Clarendon Press) lviii p., 1 l.
Heine, Heinrich (1959), Religion and Philosophy in Germany: A Fragment (Boston: Beacon Press) xxiii, 177.
Herbert, George (2015), The Complete Poetry (Penguin) lvii, 578.
Johnson, Samuel (1955), Lives of the English Poets 2 Vols. (London: Oxford University Press).
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (2000), The Waste Books, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: New York Review Books) xxv, 235.
Penn, William (1993), The Peace of Europe; The Fruits of Solitude: and Other Writings (Rutland, Vt.: C.E. Tuttle) xxxiii, 322.
Stamper, Kory (2017), Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries (New York: Pantheon Books) xiv, 299.
Tottel, Richard, et al. (1965), Tottel's Miscellany (1557-1587): Vol. 1, 2 vols. (Rev. edn.; Cambridge: Harvard University Press) xxi, 345.
Wyatt, Thomas (1963), Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) xlviii, 298.