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There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.

— Dorothy Parker

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Funny

More quotes by Dorothy Parker

I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things.

Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.

Enough Rope (1926)

That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.

That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say No in any of them.

Our Mrs Parker (1934)

Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.

All Dorothy Parker quotes →

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Wit's an unruly engine, wildly striking
Sometimes a friend, sometimes the engineer.

George Herbert The Temple (1633)

A tragedy can never suffer by delay: a comedy may, because the allusions or the manners represented in it maybe temporary.

Horace Walpole

The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel– a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.

Horace Walpole

Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.

Karl Barth The Harper Book of Quotations (1993)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Dorothy Parker (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.