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Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.
Sep 10, 2025
Stories now, to suit a public taste, must be half epigram, half pleasant vice.
Tis easy to write epigrams nicely, but to write a book is hard.
An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly.
An epigram is a flashlight of a truth; a witticism, truth laughing at itself.
Epigrams need no crier, but are content with their own tongue.
An epigram is but a feeble thing - With straw in tail, stuck there by way of sting.
Epigram and truth are rarely commensurate. Truth has to get somewhat chiseled, as it were, before it will fit into an epigram.
EPIGRAM, n. A short, sharp saying in prose or verse, frequently characterize by acidity or acerbity and sometimes by wisdom.
No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'
Audiences are always better pleased with a smart retort, some joke or epigram, than with any amount of reasoning.
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.
Better a lively old epigram than a deadly new one.
It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.
My poetry is not lyric. The epigrams are lyric because they come from my youthful period of lyricism, but my other poetry is not lyric.
All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.
You can cram a truth into an epigram - the truth, never.
Victorian society was homogeneous without being homogenized. It was, to paraphrase the epigram about Parliament, a society of extreme eccentrics who agreed so well that they could afford to differ.
I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.
The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.
A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.
Feminine passion is to masculine as an epic is to an epigram.
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.
An epigram is the marriage of wit and wisdom; a wisecrack, their divorce.
In such a case the writer is apt to have recourse to epigrams. Somewhere in this world there is an epigram for every dilemma.
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.
A college of wit-crackers cannot flout me out of my humor. Dost thou think I care for a satire or an epigram?
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.
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.
It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
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.
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.
nothing is so pleasant ... as to display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a trifle tedious to hear another person display theirs.
The Reformation has been called in a biting epigram "a rising of the rich against the poor."
An epigram is a half-truth so stated as to irritate the person who believes the other half.
What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul.
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.
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.
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.
It is with epigrams as with other inventions; the best ones annoy us because we didn't think of them ourselves.
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand.
To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower.
To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.
I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
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.
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.
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.
A pun, though despicable in itself, can be the noblest vehicle of an artistic intention by serving as the abbreviation of a wittyview. It can be a social criticism in the form of an epigram.
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.