Life & Wisdom Quote by Christian Nestell Bovee

Wit, Bovee implies, is a kind of social currency - and like any currency, it circulates. The line flatters the ideal of originality while slyly admitting how rarely originality actually shows up on schedule. Being witty is top-tier because it signals quickness, nerve, and a certain command of language. But the runner-up, “being able to quote another’s wit,” is a confession about how most conversation really works: we borrow our best lines, and we borrow them strategically.

The subtext is less about plagiarism than about taste. Quoting well isn’t passive; it’s curatorial. It requires a feel for timing, audience, and the tiny social risks of deploying someone else’s punchline. A good quote is a portable intelligence - a way to sound sharper than you feel in the moment, to align yourself with a tradition of cleverness, to claim membership in a shared cultural library. Bovee is also poking at the vanity baked into “wittiness”: even when you’re echoing someone else, you want the glow of the laugh to land on you.

In Bovee’s 19th-century print culture, this made special sense. Aphorisms, commonplace books, and public speaking prized memorability; people collected quotations the way we now collect screenshots and memes. His point anticipates the modern feed: the quickest route to sounding perceptive is often to repost perception. The best quoters aren’t frauds; they’re editors of the collective mind.