Quotes About Epigram

You can cram a truth into an epigram - the truth, never.

Epigram and truth are rarely commensurate. Truth has to get somewhat chiseled, as it were, before it will fit into an epigram.

An epigram is a half-truth so stated as to irritate the person who believes the other half.

And Mademoiselle Dupre, finding everything unintelligible, was completely reassured: such good-bys were normal among the unfortunate English-speakers, an uncouth language, it affected their minds; or perhaps, poor people, it was not given to all languages to perform with the precision, the clarity, the grace of a French epigram.

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

Somewhere in the world there is an epigram for every dilemma.

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.

The Reformation has been called in a biting epigram "a rising of the rich against the poor."

An epigram is the marriage of wit and wisdom; a wisecrack, their divorce.

EPIGRAM, n. A short, sharp saying in prose or verse, frequently characterize by acidity or acerbity and sometimes by wisdom.

The other day I made an epigram. I said, Anni's beauty is only sin-deep. I hope that's original? Is it? Please laugh.

And, when the whim changes, it is most easy and delightfully disconcerting to play with the respectable and cowardly bourgeois fetishes and to laugh and epigram at the flitting god-ghosts and the debaucheries and follies of wisdom.

nothing is so pleasant ... as to display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a trifle tedious to hear another person display theirs.

The epigram is a scorpion; as the sting of the scorpion lieth in the tail, the force of the epigram is in its conclusion.

The old Arab epigram drifted into his mind, that God invented silk so that women could be naked in clothes

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful

There is a finely translated epigram in the greek anthology which admirably expresses this state of mind, this acceptance of loss as unatoned for, even tho the lost element might be one's self: 'A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast, bids you set sail. Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost, weathered the gal.

In such a case the writer is apt to have recourse to epigrams. Somewhere in this world there is an epigram for every dilemma.

The sensation produced by Princess Myakaya's speeches was always unique, and the secret of the sensation she produced lay in the fact that though she spoke not always appropriately, as now, she said simple things with some sense in them. In the society in which she lived such plain statements produced the effect of the wittiest epigram.

The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.

All right. But take my advice, Mr. Hel. Don't let this chance get away. Opportunity doesn't knock twice, you know." "Penetrating observation. Did you make up the epigram?" "I'll see you tomorrow." "Very well. And ask the guard to knock on my cell door twice. I wouldn't want to confuse him with opportunity.

There is no amusement except in the lumbering diligences of France, that gabbling and indiscreet country, where every one is in a hurry to laugh and show his wit, and where jest and epigram enliven all things, even the poverty of the lower classes and the weightier cares of the solid bourgeois. In a coach there is no police to check tongues, and legislative assemblies have set the fashion of public discussion.

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

EPIGRAM, n. A short, sharp saying in prose or verse, frequently characterize by acidity or acerbity and sometimes by wisdom. Following are some of the more notable epigrams of the learned and ingenious Dr. Jamrach Holobom: