The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth.
Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
O witness of the soul naturally Christian.
You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood.
O witness of the soul naturally Christian.
The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.
Communicating wit is a lonely art. It demands an independent soul.
When we look to presumed sources of origin for competing evolutionary explanations of the giraffe's long neck, we find either nothing at all, or only the shortest of speculative conjectures. Length, of course, need not correspond with importance. Garrulous old Polonius, in a rare moment of clarity, reminded us that "brevity is the soul of wit" (and then immediately vitiated his wise observation with a flood of woolly words about Hamlet's Madness.)
Impropriety is the soul of wit.
What is an Epigram? a dwarfish whole,
Its body brevity, and wit its soul.