Quote: An epigram is a flashlight of a truth; a witticism, truth laughing at itself.
Author: Minna Antrim 1861-18?, American Epigrammist
Quote: Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.
Author: Francis H. Bradley 1846-1924, British Philosopher
Quote: 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.
Author: Lord Chesterfield 1694-1773, British Statesman, Author
Quote: 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.
Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772-1834, British Poet, Critic, Philosopher
Quote: An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.
Author: Karl Kraus 1874-1936, Austrian Satirist
Quote: An epigram is only a wisecrack that's played at Carnegie Hall.
Author: Oscar Levant 1906-1972, American Pianist, Actor
Quote: He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close, and rendering it portable.
Author: Thomas B. Macaulay 1800-1859, American Essayist and Historian
Quote: Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.
Author: W. Somerset Maugham 1874-1965, British Novelist, Playwright
Quote: 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.
Author: John Morley 1838-1923, British Journalist, Biographer, Statesman
Quote: There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
Author: Vladimir Nabokov 1899-1977, Russian-born American Novelist, Poet
Quote: 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.
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900, German Philosopher
Quote: 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.
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900, German Philosopher
Quote: Epigrams succeed where epics fail.
Author: Persian Proverb Sayings of Persian Origin
Quote: Certain brief sentences are peerless in their ability to give one the feeling that nothing remains to be said.
Author: Jean Rostand 1894-1977, French Biologist, Writer
Quote: An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
Author: Friedrich Schlegel 1772-1829, German Philosopher, Critic, Writer
Quote: 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.
Author: Susan Sontag 1933-, American Essayist
Quote: He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone.
Author: Oscar Wilde 1856-1900, British Author, Wit