Quotes about aphorisms-and-epigrams

An epigram is a flashlight of a truth; a witticism, truth laughing at itself.

— Minna Antrim

Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

— Francis H. Bradley

Most maxim-mongers have preferred the prettiness to the justness of a thought, and the turn to the truth; but I have refused myself to everything that my own experience did not justify and confirm.

— Lord Chesterfield

Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.

— Karl Kraus

An epigram is only a wisecrack that's played at Carnegie Hall.

— Oscar Levant

He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close, and rendering it portable.

— Thomas B. Macaulay

Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.

— W. Somerset Maugham

They are the guiding oracles which man has found out for himself in that great business of ours, of learning how to be, to do, to do without, and to depart.

— John Morley

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

— Vladimir Nabokov

The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of eternity; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book -- what everyone else does not say in a book.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak, but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks: and those to whom they are spoken should be big and tall of stature.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Epigrams succeed where epics fail.

— Persian Proverb

Certain brief sentences are peerless in their ability to give one the feeling that nothing remains to be said.

— Jean Rostand

An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.

— Friedrich Schlegel

It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.

— Susan Sontag

He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone.

— Oscar Wilde