Skip to content

Against their wills what numbers ruin shun,
Purely through want of wit to be undone!
Nature has shown by making it so rare,
That wit's a jewel which we need not wear.

— Edward Young

Another quote →

Topics

Funny

More quotes by Edward Young

The blood will follow where the knife is driven,
The flesh will quiver where the pincers tear.

In youth, what disappointments of our own making: in age, what disappointments from the nature of things.

The man that makes a character makes foes.

Death loves a shining mark, a signal blow.

Night-Thoughts (1742)

By night an atheist half believes in God.

Night Thoughts (1743)

All Edward Young quotes →

You may also like

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: Edward Young (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.