Aphorisms And Epigrams

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

Oscar Wilde
1856-1900, British Author, Wit

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(344 votes)   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
1844-1900, German Philosopher

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(303 votes)   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
1933-, American Essayist

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(277 votes)   Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.

W. Somerset Maugham
1874-1965, British Novelist, Playwright

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(265 votes)   Epigrams succeed where epics fail.

Persian Proverbs
Sayings of Persian Origin

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(256 votes)   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
1772-1834, British Poet, Critic, Philosopher

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(250 votes)   An epigram is a flashlight of a truth; a witticism, truth laughing at itself.

Minna Antrim
1861-18?, American Epigrammist

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(228 votes)   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
1694-1773, British Statesman, Author

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(227 votes)   An epigram is only a wisecrack that's played at Carnegie Hall.

Oscar Levant
1906-1972, American Pianist, Actor

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

Karl Kraus
1874-1936, Austrian Satirist

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(220 votes)   He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close, and rendering it portable.

Thomas B. Macaulay
1800-1859, American Essayist and Historian

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