An aphorism is nothing else but the slightest
QUOTES AND APHORISMS ON APHORISMS An epigram is a flashlight of a truth; a witticism, truth laughing at itself.
Minna Antrim (1861-1950, American epigrammist)
Endurance is frequently a form of indecision.
Elizabeth Bibesco
Our life experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.
Francis H. Bradley (1846-1924, British philosopher)
All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797, British political writer, statesman)
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.
Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield (1694-1773, British statesman, author)
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)
Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth. But we seem to have other.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there.
E. H. Gombrich
As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784, British author)
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)
Beggars should be abolished. It annoys one to give to them, and it annoys one not to give to them.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, German philosopher)
An epigram is only a wisecrack that's played at Carnegie Hall.
Oscar Levant (1906-1972, American pianist, actor)
Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965, British novelist, playwright)
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.
John Morley (1838-1923, British journalist, biographer, statesman)
There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977, Russian-born American novelist, poet)
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)
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.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, German philosopher)
Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.
Plato (BC 427?-347?, Greek philosopher)
Epigrams succeed where epics fail.
Persian Proverb (Sayings of Persian origin)
A variety of nothing is superior to a monotony of something.
Jean Paul Richter (1763-1825, German novelist)
Certain brief sentences are peerless in their ability to give one the feeling that nothing remains to be said.
Jean Rostand (1894-1977, French biologist, writer)
An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829, German philosopher, critic, writer)
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)
Disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
Paul Valery (1871-1945, French poet, essayist)
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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