Epigrams Quotes - Page 3

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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.

  Karl Kraus

  Criticism, Abbreviations, Artistic

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• Epigrams need no crier, but are content with their own tongue.

  Martial

  Needs, Tongue

  Martial (2014). “Delphi Complete Works of Martial (Illustrated)”, p.120, Delphi Classics

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• An epigram is a flashlight of a truth; a witticism, truth laughing at itself.

  Minna Antrim

  Laughter, Truth, Laughing

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• The Greek epigram intimates that the force of love is not shown by the courting of beauty, but where the like desire is inflamed for one who is ill-favored.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Love Is, Greek, Desire

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.115, Courier Corporation

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• 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.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Jesus, Taken, Heart

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• 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.

  William Matthews

  Song, Reflection, Ideas

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• 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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