Epigrams Quotes - Page 3

• 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.

  Joseph P. Farrell

  Advice, Temptation, Fit

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• No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Men, Solitude

  C. S. Lewis (1984). “The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis”, p.206, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The object of a comedy is not to correct morals or ridicule the vices of society; no, a comedy should depict the discrepancies between life and purpose, should be the fruit of bitter indignation aroused by the degradation of human dignity, should be sarcasm, and not an epigram, convulsive laughter and not an amused grin, should be written with bile and not diluted salt, in a word, it should embrace life in its highest significance.

  Vissarion Belinsky

  Laughter, Sarcasm, Discrepancies Between

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• 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.

  John Updike

  Funny, Sex, War

  Self-Consciousness ch. 4 (1989)

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• An epigram is only a wisecrack that's played at Carnegie Hall.

  Oscar Levant

  Wise, Carnegie, Halls

  Quoted in Evan Esar, The Treasury of Humorous Quotations (1951)

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• Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

  F. H. Bradley

  Writing, Heart, Blood

  "Aphorisms". Book by F. H. Bradley No. 25, 1930.

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• Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Truth, Lying, Telling The Truth

  W. Somerset Maugham (2011). “A Writer's Notebook”, p.26, Random House

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• 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.

  George Santayana

  God, Philosophy, Men

  George Santayana (1954). “The Life of Reason ; Or, The Phases of Human Progress. One-volume Ed”

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• I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the 'Yale News.'—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.' This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  College, Men, Yale

  The Great Gatsby ch. 1 (1925)

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• A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Funny Life, Feelings, Jokes

  Human, All Too Human vol. 2, pt. 1, sec. 202 (1878) (translation by R. J. Hollingdale)

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• There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.

  Margaret Atwood

  Disappointment, Ducks, Office

  Margaret Atwood (2002). “Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing”, p.35, Cambridge University Press

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• Interestingly, the actress who, in her own persona, may be gentle, shy, and socially awkward, someone whose hand trembles when pouring a cup of tea for a visiting friend, can convincingly portray an elegant, cruel aristocrat tossing off malicious epigrams in an eighteenth-century chocolate house.

  Wallace Shawn

  Hands, House, Awkward

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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

  Don Marquis

  Art, Literature, Newspapers

  In E. Anthony O Rare Don Marquis (1962) p. 354

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

  Karl Kraus

  Passion, Epic, Masculine And Feminine

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

  William Cowper

  Tails, Way, Stuck

  William Cowper, Sir Humphrey Sumner Milford (1971). “Poetical works”

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• Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.

  Nicolas Chamfort

  Men, Oysters, Literature

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• Audiences are always better pleased with a smart retort, some joke or epigram, than with any amount of reasoning.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Smart, Retorts, Audience

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935). “The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography”, p.328, Univ of Wisconsin Press

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• 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.

  Dorothy Parker

  Trying, Credit, Oscars

  "A Pig's-Eye View of Literature" l. 10 (1928)

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• There is a homely directness about these rustic apothegms which makes them far more palatable than the strained and sophisticated epigrams of the characters of Oscar Wilde's plays, who are ever striving strenuously to dazzle us with verbal pyrotechnics.

  Brander Matthews

  Character, Play, Oscars

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

  Delmore Schwartz

  Character, Effort, Literature

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• If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

  David Foster Wallace

  Real, Grieving, Skeletons

  "'Plain Old Untrendy Troubles and Emotions'". www.theguardian.com. September 19, 2008.

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• Many pundits today are in the habit of misquoting Santayana's epigram, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Maybe some people have come to grief this way, but they are probably fewer than those who have fallen into the opposite error. One is apt to perish in politics from too much memory, Tocqueville wrote somewhere, with equal truth and greater insight.

  David Hackett Fischer

  Memories, Grief, Past

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

  Ambrose Bierce

  Wisdom, Sometimes, Prose

  Ambrose Bierce (2009). “The Devil's Dictionary: Easyread Large Bold Edition”, p.71, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• PLATITUDE, n. The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A jelly-fish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. A desiccated epigram.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Truth, Sea, Departed

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.165, 谷月社

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• You complain, friend Swift, of the length of my epigrams, but you yourself write nothing. Yours are shorter.

  Martial

  Friendship, Writing, Complaining

  "Martial epigrams". Book by Martial, I, 110, 1897.

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