Quotes about Epigrams

Elias Canetti

The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

It is with epigrams as with other inventions; the best ones annoy us because we didn't think of them ourselves.

W. Somerset Maugham

Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.

Thomas Carlyle

France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.

William Howard Taft

I am not sure that I can make the epigrams that you are hunting for. The truth is you have a pretty old horse to run and you’ve got to take me as I am.

Campaign managers are always trying to get their candidates to do something new or change something. See {600677} for an Example with President Eisenhower. He was a little more flexible than Taft was. His campaign manager wanted him to tell some self deprecating jokes in his presentations, but he could not bring himself to do it, especially following Theodore Roosevelt who was a master at it.

Norman Douglas

You can cram a truth into an epigram - the truth, never.

Peter De Vries

Rather than waste precious time arguing, I went up and started serving my "sentence" without delay. It was usually about an hour for epigrams; somewhat longer for a paradox.

William James

I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.

Oscar Wilde

I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

Joseph Joubert

I would fain coin wisdom,—mould it, I mean, into maxims, proverbs, sentences, that can easily be retained and transmitted. Would that I could denounce and banish from the language of men—as base money—the words by which they cheat and are cheated!

Hendrik Willem Van Loon

In such a case the writer is apt to have recourse to epigrams. Somewhere in this world there is an epigram for every dilemma.

Epigrams Quotes