Quotes About Epigram

On Oscar Wilde:] If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it. [ Life Magazine, June 2, 1927]

A college of wit-crackers cannot flout me out of my humor. Dost thou think I care for a satire or an epigram?

On the temple to Athena at Athens was inscribed the epigram "All human things are a circle"—a sentiment echoed by Greco-Roman philosophers from Aristotle to Marcus Aurelius.

An epigram is but a feeble thing - With straw in tail, stuck there by way of sting.

If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it.

Life opened up in one if its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: 'Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.' On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.

epigram, than which, if one is content with ostensible

Feminine passion is to masculine as an epic is to an epigram.

PLATITUDE, n. The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. A fossil sentiment in artificial rock. A moral without the fable. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A demi-tasse of milk-and-mortality. The Pope's-nose of a featherless peacock. A jelly-fish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. The cackle surviving the egg. A desiccated epigram.

Aphorism, n. Predigested wisdom.

All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.

Odes were the compositions in which he took most delight, and it was long before he liked his Epistles and Satires. He told me what he read solidly at Oxford was Greek; not the Grecian historians, but Homer and Euripides, and now and then a little Epigram; that the study of which he was the most fond was Metaphysicks, but he had not read much, even in that way.

APOPHTHEGM  (A'POPHTHEGM)   n.s. remarkable saying; a valuable maxim uttered on some sudden occasion.

What is an Epigram? A dwarfish whole, Its body brevity, and wit its soul.

An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly.

The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram; and the proverbs of nations, which embody the commonsense of nations, have the brisk concussion of the most sparkling wit.

What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.

the truth about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw. Each of them is an argument impatiently shortened into an epigram. Each of them represents a truth hammered and hardened, with an almost disdainful violence until it is compressed into a small space, until it is made brief and almost incomprehensible.

How mad a man must appear when desire renders him alternately angry and tender, insolent and abject, biting as an epigram and soothing as a madrigal!

words...To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.

Take my advice, dear reader, don't talk epigrams even if you have the gift. I know, to those have, the temptation is almost irresistible. But resist it. Epigram and truth are rarely commensurate. Truth has to be somewhat chiselled, as it were, before it will quite fit into an epigram.

Our live experiences fixed in aphorisms stiffen into cold epigram. Our heart's blood, as we write with it, darkens into ink.

Nowhere else would Napoleonic troops encounter soldiers who fought as fanatically or bravely when defending a position; a famous epigram said that you not only had to kill the Russian soldier, you had to then push him over.

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