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Wittily   Listen
adverb
Wittily  adv.  In a witty manner; wisely; ingeniously; artfully; with wit; with a delicate turn or phrase, or with an ingenious association of ideas. "Who his own harm so wittily contrives."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Wittily" Quotes from Famous Books



... did, Madame 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, Conti, and ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... than John Bull, but he is tarred with the English stick. For Mr. Grant White the States are the New England States and nothing more. He wonders at the amount of drinking in London; let him try San Francisco. He wittily reproves English ignorance as to the status of women in America; but has he not himself forgotten Wyoming? The name Yankee, of which he is so tenacious, is used over the most of the great Union as a term of reproach. The ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... truest poetry, richest wit, or the most delicate humour, he presents personal experiences with that simplicity of pure camaraderie which assumes that the reader could do the same—if he had the mind, as Lamb himself put it when wittily snubbing Wordsworth. In most books, as De Quincey has pointed out, the author figures as a mere abstraction, "without sex or age or local station," whom the reader banishes from his thoughts, but in the case of Lamb and that brilliant line of authors to which he belongs, we must know something ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold

... 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

... 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

... who happens to be one of the few real poets we possess, once wittily summed up a general objection to criticism of the kind we advocate as 'always asking people to do what they can't.' But to point out, as the philosophical critic would, that poetry itself must inevitably languish if the more comprehensive kinds are neglected, or if ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry

... invited English and foreign friends, whom something to do with authorship 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 was capable when touched by Otto Goldsmidt? Can I forget, also, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... you are herd animals; 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

... 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 the very ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... harm in a sweetheart, is there?" "None in the least, ma'am; I advoise you to double the dose. We often hear of two strings to a bow. Daun't you think it would be noicer to have two beaux to your string?" As he thus wittily expressed himself, the gentleman took off his cap, and thrust his fingers through a very curling and comely head of hair; the young lady looked at him with evident coquetry, and said, "How you do run on, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... 'Padre Souchongs' and 'Twankays'; we know them already."—Then speak for me, immortal Pindar Cockloft! crusty bachelor that thou art! who hast told that tea and scandal are inseparable, and hast so wittily described a gathering ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

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

... 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

... Haslewood, whose edition (1818) is the best, attributed it to Richard Brathwait (circ. 1588-1673). The title of the second edition (1716) runs as follows: 'Drunken Barnaby's Four Journeys to the North of England. In Latin and English Verse. Wittily and merrily (tho' near one hundred years ago) composed; found among some old musty books, that had a long time lain by in a corner; and now at last made publick. To which ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... must needs tell you, the place to 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 vol. 2 • Anon.

... had not yet exploded on the Weissenberg of Prag, [Battle there, Sunday 8th November, 1620.] when old Sir Henry Wotton being sent as Ambassador "to LIE abroad" (as he wittily called it, to his cost) in that Business, saw, in the City of Lintz in the picturesque green country by the shores of the Donau there, an ingenious person, who is now recognizable as one of the remarkablest of mankind, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle

... messengers who promised to "run the blockade," I had no notion, until the armistice restored us to communications with the outer world, that one in twenty had reached its destination. This mode of writing, as Dr. William Russell wittily observed to me the other day at Versailles, was much like smoking in the dark—and it must be my excuse for ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere

... Rio de Janeiro on the 6th of December, having put in at Gibraltar, and made a short stay at Teneriffe, one of the Canaries, which, as Freycinet wittily observes, were not Fortunate Islands for his crew, all communication with the land being forbidden ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne

... younger days 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 years ago I spent one of the most delightful evenings of my life ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg

... this visit of Madame de Stael so wittily, with so much naivete, and with such peculiar local coloring, that we cannot refrain from laying a literal translation of the ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach

... "Some there be," he says, "which have a mind to renew terms that are now almost 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 the use of inkhorn terms. "Though ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos

... misfortunes and too proud to undergo a public trial, cut short a life which already was doomed. Never have plotters failed more ignominiously and played more completely into the hands of their enemy. A mot of the Boulevards wittily sums up the results of their puny efforts: "They came to France to give her a king, and they gave ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... 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 ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... the destruction of public 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, whereupon she expressed ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... 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 ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... written them if I would, yet, not having done so, the censure will deservedly fall, if at all due, upon the memory of Mr. Peter Pattieson; whereas I must be justly entitled to the praise, when any is due, seeing that, as the Dean of St. Patrick's wittily and logically expresseth it, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... race, still retain the most living faith in 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 the Fates, ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne

... work—his Father Stafford, for instance, a novel that did not win one-tenth of the notice it deserved. It is practice at short range. It moves very close to real life. Real people, of course, do not converse as briskly and wittily as do Mr. Hope's characters: but these have nothing of the impossible in them, and even in the whole business of Omofaga there is nothing more fantastic than its delightful name. The book is genuinely ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... walking monster that does the great wrong to women is, depend upon it, Eusebius, the "brute of a husband," called, by courtesy, in higher life, "Sir John Brute." Horace says wittily, that Venus puts together discordant persons and minds with a bitter joke, "saevo mittere cum joco;" it begins a jest, and ends a crying evil. We name the thing that should be good, with an ambiguous sound that gives disagreement to the sense. It is marry-age, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... 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 preachers; their doctrines are most repulsive and strongly ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... busy. At noon, it being washing day, I toward White Hall, and stopped and dined all alone at Hercules Pillars, where I was mighty pleased to overhear a woman talk to her counsel how she had troubled her neighbours with law, and did it very roguishly and wittily. Thence to White Hall, and there we attended the Duke of York as usual; and I did present Mrs. Pett, the widow, and her petition to the Duke of York, for some relief from the King. Here was to-day a proposition made to the Duke of York by Captain Von Hemskirke for L20,000, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

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

... pacification, 73. "Ceste meschante petite paix," La Noue, c. xix. Agrippa d'Aubigne, Hist. universelle, i. 260, and, following him, Browning, Hist. of the Huguenots, i. 220, and De Felice, Hist. of the Protestants of France, 190, say that this peace was wittily christened "La paix boiteuse et mal-assise;" but, as we shall see, this designation belongs to the peace of Saint Germain-en-Laye, in 1570, ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... 'Perch (Aborre) and Stockfish,'" said one of our neighbors wittily to me, as I came with it to her after having read it with great satisfaction and joy to all the people in our street. This entirely depressed me, because I felt that she was turning both me and my poem to ridicule. With a troubled heart I told it to ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen

... little singular, that Dr 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 ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... certainly decreased. Mrs. Duffer believed her no longer to be handsome; Clara had always thought her to be pert; Mrs. Demijohn had expressed her opinion that the man was an idiot; and the landlady at the "Duchess of Edinburgh" had wittily asserted that "young marquises were not to be caught with chaff." There was no doubt a sense of relief in Clara Demijohn's mind when she heard that this special young marquis had been trampled to death in the hunting field, and ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope

... us seek the truth. To be sure, Taine has written very wittily: "I never thought that a truth could be of any practical use!" but we may not be of the same mind, and may think, on the contrary, that the search for truth is the prime ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... pretentious or absurd. He was comparing her with others all the time, with men and women—women especially—in whose presence he felt himself as diffident as she did in his. He was thinking of ladies in velvet dresses and diamonds, who could talk wittily of pictures and theatres and books, who could amuse him and distract him. And meanwhile she went about in her old stuff dress, her cotton apron and rolled-up sleeves, cooking and washing and cleaning—for her child and for him. She felt through every nerve that ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... another son of that happy age, was something more than a mere wealthy country squire, breeder of beef and brewer of ale. He was a courtier and traveler; and, if tradition speaks truly, a poet who could praise his mistress's many charms, or wittily resent her caprices, in well-turned verse. He was a patron of art, having brought back ivories and bronzes from Italy, pictures and china from the Low Countries, and enamels from France. He was a student, and collected the many rare and handsome leather-bound volumes telling of curious ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... fifty-seven was beheaded for fidelity to conscience, on the 6th of July, 1535. He was, like Southey, a man of purest character, and in 1516, when his age was thirty-eight, there was published at Louvain his "Utopia," which sketched wittily an ideal commonwealth that was based on practical and earnest thought upon what constitutes a state, and in what direction to look for amendment of ills. More also withdrew from his most advanced post of opinion. When he wrote "Utopia" he advocated absolute ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey

... 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 ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle

... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various

... association—can be distinguished; whereas in the whole of Tristan there are of such Leitmotive in the narrowest sense not more than three or four. The treatment is also very different. The Ring is not entirely innocent of what has been wittily called the "visiting-card" employment of motives, while in Tristan the musical motive does not repeat, but rather supplements, the words, indicating what these have left untold, thus entering as truly into the substance ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight

... possible to mention those of secondary talent; but no compunction need be felt at alluding to Segrais, a graceful manufacturer of eclogues, and Benserade, who rhymed delightfully for masquerades and was capable, on occasions, of being wittily but ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet

... 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

... century has been even more common among the Western Jews than in Christian nations, and it appears to have spread quite as rapidly among the women as among the men. Many Jews have passed into complete religious indifference—into absolute and often very cynical negation. They have become, as Sheridan wittily said, like the blank page between the Old and the New Testament. Others have taken refuge in a kind of highly rationalised Judaism little different from pure Theism. Some of the most independent, scientific, and trenchant criticism of the Old Testament writings has ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... as a Frenchman 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 and future, nay, ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon

... enthusiast, who worships all great men indifferently, [and who] finds himself in a distressful position when his gods fall out among themselves. His case [Sir Walter wittily adds] is not much unlike that of Terah, the father of Abraham, who (if the legend be true) was a dealer in idols among the Chaldees, and, coming home to his shop one day, after a brief absence, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey

... to embody his theological system in verse. This gives a doctrinal rigidity and even dryness to parts of the Paradise Lost, which injure its effect as a poem. His "God the father turns a school divine:" his Christ, as has been wittily said, is "God's good boy:" the discourses of Raphael to Adam are scholastic lectures: Adam himself is too sophisticated for the state of innocence, and Eve is somewhat insipid. The real protagonist of the poem is Satan, upon ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... it has been wittily called), the Punch man bethought him of the Rev. R.J. CAMPBELL, once the very darling of the new gods—in fact the arch neo-theologian. But Mr. CAMPBELL, erstwhile so articulate and confident, had nothing to say. All he could do was to lock ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 13, 1917 • Various

... polite 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

... I say, what I thought the best part of her, George made me cut out. No, I never knew any one sing exactly like Kezia, but there are such cases on record. There was "the Singing Cobbler," whose wife complained of him in court, and he defended himself so wittily in verse, that everybody sided with him, and his wife forgave his offence, whatever it ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... maliciously sets a quotation from Henri de Regnier: "Le plaisir delicieux et toujours nouveau d'une occupation inutile." With Casella, he writes a musical "A la maniere de," parodying Wagner, d'Indy, Chabrier, Strauss and others most wittily. Something of Eric Satie, the clown of music, exists in him, too. And probably nothing makes him so inexplicable and irritating to his audiences as his ironic streak. People are willing to forgive an ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... 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

... brilliant evening was brought to a happy conclusion without a single cloud to mar the enjoyment of the guests. Marguerite performed a veritable miracle of fortitude, forcing her very smiles to seem natural and gay, chatting pleasantly, even wittily, upon every known fashionable topic of the day, laughing merrily the while her poor, aching heart was ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... 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 ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley

... writer has wittily remarked that "perhaps the most ardent admirer of hymeneal rites would cheerfully admit that he could not conceive St. Paul or St. John starting on a nuptial tour, accompanied by the latest fashions from Athens or Ephesus, and the graceful brides whom they ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons

... wrote wittily and charmingly every week, and there was another girl ... Still, two letters and a bright pink paper or two made a modest postbag by the side ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace

... 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 trimmings of ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... Hume have with these principles? First of all, he protests against those who should deduce from his principles the immorality of his system. Take care, said he wittily (just like Spinoza, by the way), it is the partisans of free-will who are immoral. No doubt! It is when there is liberty that there is no responsibility. I am not responsible for my actions if they have no connection in me with anything durable ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet

... to make the love of all wines, under whatever guise, excuse, or occasion, the test of a true taste for wine and an unfeigned adoration of Bacchus; and, like Lucretius after him, he wittily compiled a list of names, by which the lover will flatter the most opposite qualities, if they only succeed in arousing his inclination. To be omnivorous is one pole of true love: to be exclusive is the other. A man whose heart, if I may say so, lies deeper, hidden under a thicker coat of mail, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... in them are thoroughly unprogressive and unpractical. 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 ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... broadly as to show his whole case of broad strong white teeth. Father Aldrovand himself grinned in sympathy, and then proceeded to say,—"Come, come, I see how it is. Thou hast studied some small revenge on me for doubting of thy truth; and, in verity, I think thou hast taken it wittily enough. But wherefore didst thou not let me into the secret from the beginning? I promise thee I had foul ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... of 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 which no lady ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... charity which disposed him to continual applications for, and benedictions on those that he met withal; he had an heart full of good wishes and a mouth full of kind blessings for them. And he often made his expressions very wittily agreeable to the circumstances which he saw the persons in. Sometimes when he came into a family, he would call for all the young people in it, that so he might very distinctly lay his holy hands upon every ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various

... had 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 ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge

... 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

... sternness of the warrior was happily blended with the coolness of the scientific thinker. The accord between him and Bluecher was close and cordial; and the latter, on receiving the degree of doctor of laws from the University of Oxford, wittily acknowledged his debt to the strategist. "Well," said he, "if I am to be a doctor, they must make Gneisenau an apothecary; for he makes up the pills and I then ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... a St. Petersburg official, but plenty about Kostroma and Saratov ones. A pity you don't read the letters. There are some very fine passages in them. For instance, not long ago a lieutenant writes to a friend describing a ball very wittily.—Splendid! "Dear friend," he says, "I live in the regions of the Empyrean, lots of girls, bands playing, flags flying." He's put a lot of feeling into his description, a whole lot. I've kept the letter on purpose. Would you like to ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol

... to have taken place on the very day when he received his order of banishment, and had written in the notes of invitation—M. Le Comte de Lusace will be there. This Count was the brother of the Dauphine, and this mention of him was deservedly thought impertinent. The King said, wittily enough, "Lambert and Moliere will be there." She scarcely ever spoke of the Cardinal de Bernis after his ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various

... dead. After 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 ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant

... off his late intent, For sharply he did think to reprehend her, Which cunning love did wittily prevent: Fair fall the wit that can so well defend her! 472 For on the grass she lies as she were slain Till his breath breatheth life in ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare

... was an easy 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 make Maximilian ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson

... 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 ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty

... beaming as a child's, and with graceful abandon she throws herself into a chair and begins a ripple of gay talk. The two pretty assistants come in and look at her with loving eyes; we all cluster around while she wittily recounts her recent lecturing experience. As the little lady keeps up her merry talk, I think over these three representative women. The white-haired, comely matron sitting there hand-in-hand with her daughter, intellectual, large-hearted, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... 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

... remarkable extrax from this book have been given already (the cream of the Dairy, as I wittily say,) I shall trouble you, nevertheless, with a few; partly because they can't be repeated too often, and because the toan of obsyvation with which they have been genrally received by the press, is not igsackly ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... was introduced for no other reason than that the clergy, who took upon them to be the sole judges of religion, might, without control, impose what selfish doctrines they pleased." Of the High Church clergy he wittily observes: "Some say that their lives might serve for a very good rule, if men would act quite contrary to them; for then there is no Christian virtue which they could fail ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer

... to abandon the beliefs he had once held. Perhaps the most interesting point he makes is the deficiency of the New Testament teaching as a system of morals. Greg was a Unitarian. He rejected dogma and inspiration, but he regarded himself as a Christian. Sir J. F. Stephen wittily described his position as that of a disciple "who had heard the Sermon on the Mount, whose attention had not been called to the Miracles, and who died ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury

... the etiquette of precedence is not rightly understood, and nobody knows who ought to be led out first; all the way down stairs a dead silence, and then the difficulty of distributing the company almost equals the previous dilemma of the drawing-room: wives are wittily warned against sitting by husbands, and two gentlemen are facetiously interdicted from sitting together; the hostess takes the top of the table to be useful, not ornamental, for fish and joint and turkey, must she carve; while her ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various

... Ehrenfels wittily remarks that if it were a moral precept that a man should never have intercourse more them once in his life with any particular woman, this would correspond far better with the nature of the normal male and would cost him far less ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... 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 drugs which prevailed, both ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove

... 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 ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... weekly budgets of news written by a young girl in Boston to a dear friend in Venice.... 'Emergency lectures,' fashionable religion, amateur cooking, horse-car politeness, servants, summer hotels, symphony concerts, and other Boston topics are wittily touched upon, and the frailty of human nature, especially of feminine human nature, is most mercilessly exposed in the various phases which ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant

... struggle, Adrian sank into his grave, a good pope unwept and 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 it, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... justice to believe that I do not quote these lines of Dryden as being the finest poetry he ever wrote; for poets, you know, as Waller wittily observed, never succeed so well in truth as ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth

... the depths of a 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 ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge

... advantage as well as of Mr. Pepys' or any friend he had. And when I talked that I would go about doing something of the Controller's work when I had time, and that I thought the Controller would not take it ill, he wittily replied that there was nothing in the world so hateful as a dog in the manger. Back by coach to the Exchange, there spoke with Sir W. Rider about insuring, and spoke with several other persons about ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

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

... definite object, although it is perhaps the earliest of all games. Then my spirit inquired what Nature, who everywhere thinks so profoundly and employs her cunning in such a large way, and who, instead of talking wittily, behaves wittily, may think of those naive intimations which refined speakers ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... only, he was kind, polite, and witty, after the fashion of 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 ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac

... is it," he observes, "to call rogue and villain, and that wittily! But how hard to make a man appear a fool, a blockhead, or a knave, without using any of those opprobrious terms! To spare the grossness of the names, and to do the thing yet more severely, is to draw a full face, and to make ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker

... sir Toby: for as the old hermit of Prage that neuer saw pen and inke, very wittily sayd to a Neece of King Gorbodacke, that that is, is: so I being M[aster]. Parson, am M[aster]. Parson; for what is that, but that? and is, but is? ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... knowledge among his friends that he had acted as the company's agent, Boone himself consistently refrained from betraying the confidence of his employers. Upon a similar mission, Gist had carefully concealed from the suspicious Indians the fact that he carried a compass, which they wittily termed "land stealer"; and Washington likewise imposed secrecy upon his land agent Crawford, insisting that the operation be carried on under the guise of hunting game." The discreet Boone, taciturn and given to keeping his ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson

... in the Jesuits Colledge at Poictiers, disputing before the regent on their Lesson, the on demanded, Mater cuius generis est: the other, knowing that the mother of the proponer had a wery ill name of a whore, replied wittily, distinguo; da distinctionem then; replied, si intelligas de mea est faeminini; si de tua, est communis (in the same sort ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder

... 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 ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips

... plausible argument, and abundant wit. What really does delight us is the often irrelevant wit of the conversation, and this because Mr. Shaw himself delights in irrelevant wit; it is only when he is writing wittily and irrelevantly that he is disinterested, that he is doing something for its own sake, that he is writing in the only way in which an artist can write effectively. But in so far as he is aiming at something other than a significant ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James

... 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

... formalities... you mentioned 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 legal tradition, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... to me 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 ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... observations, which are as true as they are wittily stated, contradict in any way the system which we have previously prescribed; by the latter, as by the former, we succeed in producing in a woman that needed listlessness, which is the pledge of repose and tranquility. By the latter you leave a door open, that the enemy may flee; ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various

... poet, said that they had nothing of the pedagogue about them but the gown and cap. "Austere in face, and rustic in his looks," says David Buchanan, "but most polished in style and speech; and continually, even in serious conversation, jesting most wittily." "Roughhewn, slovenly, and rude," says Peacham, in his 'Compleat Gentleman,' speaking of him, probably, as he appeared in old age, "in his person, behaviour, and fashion; seldom caring for a better outside than a rugge-gown girt close about him: yet his inside ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... was 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 ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli



Words linked to "Wittily" :   witty



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