Epigrams Quotes - Page 2

• Just as the orator marks his good things by a dramatic pause, or by raising and lowering his voice, or by gesture, so the writer marks his epigrams with italics, setting the little gem, so to speak, like a jeweler.

  Oscar Wilde

  Voice, Gestures, Littles

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• France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Long, France, Despotism

  History of the French Revolution vol. 3, bk. 7, ch. 7 (1837)

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

  Norman Douglas

  Truth

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• Stories now, to suit a public taste, must be half epigram, half pleasant vice.

  James Russell Lowell

  Vices, Stories, Half

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• It is with epigrams as with other inventions; the best ones annoy us because we didn't think of them ourselves.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Thinking, Annoying, Invention

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• Tis easy to write epigrams nicely, but to write a book is hard.

  Martial

  Book, Writing, Easy

  Martial (2014). “Delphi Complete Works of Martial (Illustrated)”, Delphi Classics

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

  William Shakespeare

  Humor, College, Thinking

  William Shakespeare, Thomas Bowdler (1850). “The Family Shakspeare, in One Volume: In which Nothing is Added to the Original Text, But Those Words and Expressions are Omitted which Cannot with Propriety be Read in a Family”, p.129

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• I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

  Oscar Wilde

  Phrases, Existence

  Letter to Alfred Douglas, Jan. - Mar. 1897

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• Rather than waste precious time arguing, I went up and started serving my "sentence" without delay. It was usually about an hour for epigrams; somewhat longer for a paradox.

  Peter De Vries

  Punishment, Delay, Waste

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

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Light, Shining, Reason

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.75

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• There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: 'In the long run we are all dead.' And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Running, Father, Son

  Henry Hazlitt (2010). “Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics”, p.12, Crown Business

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

  Minna Antrim

  Laughter, Truth, Laughing

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• Heroism is no extempore work of transient impulse--a rocket rushing fretfully up to disturb the darkness by which, after a moment's insulting radiance, it is ruthlessly swallowed up,--but a steady fire, which darts forth tongues of flame. It is no sparkling epigram of action, but a luminous epic of character.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Character, Epic, Rushing

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• The first thing that strikes you about Timothy Murphys verse is the palpable texture of his line - that sound of sense practised by that other American poet-farmer, Robert Frost. And just as Murphys ear is trained on the rhythms of local speech and classical epigram, his eye holds fast on the image. This is an undeluded vision, sometimes bleak, often funny, and never less than painstakingly crafted.

  Michael Donaghy

  Eye, Vision, Sound

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• The Greek epigram intimates that the force of love is not shown by the courting of beauty, but where the like desire is inflamed for one who is ill-favored.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Love Is, Greek, Desire

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.115, Courier Corporation

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• There are expressions and bulls-eyes of the spirit, there are epigrams, a little handful of words, in which a whole culture, a whole society is suddenly crystallized.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Eye, Expression, Bulls

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• Epigrams delight us into wisdom.

  Michael R. Burch

  Delight

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

  Joseph P. Farrell

  Fit

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• If we did not know all His retorts by heart, if we had not taken the sting out of them by incessant repetition in the accents of the pulpit, and if we had not somehow got it into our heads that brains were rather reprehnsible, we should reckon Him among the greatest wits of all time. Nobody else, in three brief years, has achieved such an output of epigram.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Jesus, Taken, Heart

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• What are the precise characteristics of an epigram it is not easy to define. It differs from a joke, in the fact that the wit of the latter dies in the words, and cannot therefore be conveyed in another language; while an epigram is a wit of ideas, and hence, is translatable. Like aphorisms, songs and sonnets, it is occupied with some single point, small and manageable; but whilst a song conveys a sentiment, a sonnet a poetical, and an aphorism a moral reflection, an epigram expresses a contrast.

  William Matthews

  Song, Reflection, Ideas

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• Fight fire with fire. If you must have bores, always put them together or at the same table ... bores have an effervescent chemical reaction on one another at a party. They invariably have a marvelous time trading banalities in the absence of competition. Clichés roll trippingly off the tongue like sparkling epigrams and trite observations acquire depth sinking into receptive minds.

  Elsa Maxwell

  Party, Fighting, Fire

  Elsa Maxwell (1955). “I married the world”

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• Better a lively old epigram than a deadly new one.

  Helen Rowland

  Lively

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• I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.

  William James

  Blue, Introduction, Bolts

  William James (2008). “The Letters of William James”, Cosimo, Inc.

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• 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.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Wise, Men, Light

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.43

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

  Hendrik Willem van Loon

  World, Cases, Dilemma

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