Freedom, where are you? Who holds you back? [...] The…

you can give it a long name if you like, but I'm an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it's so rare…

— Dorothy L. Sayers

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild…

— Henry David Thoreau

I'm grateful to intelligent people. That doesn't mean educated. That doesn't mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call…

— Maya Angelou

So welcome 'Damsels in Distress,' an exhilarating gift of a comedy about college, the female intellect, the limitless male ego, inventing a new dance,…

— Peter Travers

Wit is a pleasure-giving thing, largely because it eludes reason; but in the apprehension of an absurdity through the working of the comic spirit…

— Agnes Repplier

“When you have a wit of your own, it's a pleasure to credit other people for theirs.”

— Criss Jami

Metaphor is, as a common feature of linguistic practice, an incidental expediency, a homely administering of first-aid by mother-wit to jams or halts in…

— Laura Riding

“As I ate she began the first of what we later called “my lessons in living.” She said that I must always be intolerant…

— Maya Angelou

“My dear child, you can give it a long name if you like, but I'm an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and…

— Dorothy L. Sayers

“When misfortune comes, The wisest even lose their mother wit”

— Sophocles

No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical…

— Thomas Huxley

What do you do with mother love and mother wit when the babies are grown and gone away?

— Joanne Greenberg

In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.

— Gustave Le Bon

“This faculty is mother wit, the creative power through which man is capable of recognising likenesses and making them himself. We see it in…

— John Eliot Gardiner

Listen carefully to what country people call mother wit. In those homely sayings are couched the collective wisdom of generations.

— Maya Angelou