Epigrams Quotes - Page 3

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• I am mistaken if a single epigram included fails to preserve at least some faint thrill of the emotion through which it had to pass before the Muse's lips let it fall, with however exquisite deliberation.

  Arthur Quiller-Couch

  Fall, Thrill, Lips

  "The Oxford Book of English Verse". Book edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch, Introduction, 1900.

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• The qualities all in a bee that we meet, In an epigram never should fail; The body should always be little and sweet, And a sting should be felt in its tail.

  Edward Young

  Sweet, Quality, Tails

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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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• 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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• The width of a line may present the idea of infinity. An epigram may contain a world. In the same way, a small picture format may be much more living, much more leavening, stirring, awakening, than square yards of wall space.

  Hans Hofmann

  Wall, Ideas, Space

  Hans Hofmann, Sara T. Weeks, Bartlett H. Hayes (1967). “Search for the Real: And Other Essays”, p.60, MIT Press

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