Epigrams Quotes - Page 2

• An epigram is a half-truth so stated as to irritate the person who believes the other half.

  Shailer Mathews

  Believe, Half, Persons

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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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• Every epigram should resemble a bee; it should have sting, honey, and brevity.

  Martial

  Should Have, Honey, Bees

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• 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.

  Ernesto Cardenal

  Periods, Poetry Is

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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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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• 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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• Life in the country teaches one that the really stimulating things are the quiet, natural things, and the really wearisome things are the noisy, unnatural things. It is more exciting to stand still than to dance. Silence is more eloquent than speech. Water is more stimulating than wine. Fresh air is more intoxicating than cigarette smoke. Sunlight is more subtle than electric light. The scent of grass is more luxurious than the most expensive perfume. The slow, simple observations of the peasant are more wise than the most sparkling epigrams of the latest wit.

  Beverley Nichols

  Life, Wise, Country

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• 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.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Punishment, Jail, Solitude

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• 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

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Art, Philosophy

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: De profundis, "Epistola : in carcere et vinculis"”, p.95, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• An epigram is the marriage of wit and wisdom; a wisecrack, their divorce.

  Evan Esar

  Divorce, Wit, Wit And Wisdom

  Evan Esar (1978). “The Comic Encyclopedia: A Library of the Literature and History of Humor Containing Thousands of Gags, Sayings, and Stories”, Doubleday Books

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• Some learned writers . . . have compared a Scorpion to an Epigram . . . because as the sting of the Scorpion lyeth in the tayl, so the force and virtue of an epigram is in the conclusion.

  Edward Topsell

  Scorpions, Virtue, Force

  "The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents". Book by Edward Topsell, p. 756, 1653.

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• The Reformation has been called in a biting epigram "a rising of the rich against the poor."

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Rising, Politics

  Hilaire Belloc (2016). “The Crisis Of Civilization”, p.85, TAN Books

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• No amount of misfortune will satisfy the man who is not satisfied
  with reading a hundred epigrams.

  Martial

  Reading, Men, He Man

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• 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.

  Ouida

  Wit, Trifles, Bores

  Ouida (1870). “Puck: His Vicissitudes, Adventures, Observations, Conclusions, Friendships, and Philosophies”, p.131

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• Epigrams delight us into wisdom.

  Michael R. Burch

  Delight

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

  Helen Rowland

  Lively

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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