Top 100 Aphorism Quotes
#1. The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom among us is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority...
Thomas Stockman
#2. An aphorism is an extreme synthesis of thesis and antithesis, theory and practice, it's a mixture of intuition and observation, hypothesis and illusions of certainty and probability, history and stupidity.
William C. Brown
#3. A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away by all the centuries, although it serves as food for every epoch.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#4. A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny.
Umberto Eco
#5. We often feel that a clever aphorism captures a truth that would require pages to defend in any other way.
Steven Pinker
#7. Never put off until tomorrow that which may be avoided entirely.
Bill McKean
#8. A painting is worth a thousand confused art-gallery visitors.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#12. I will take all my rights! Can you deliver them to my house?
Ljupka Cvetanova
#13. It is a sign of arrogance to be mad at someone for not acting as per your advice, especially if it was unsolicited.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#14. Aphorisms know the angles, but not the structure.
Mason Cooley
#15. I recalled my father-in-law's aphorism "To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom ... " & I pretended to extract a speck from my eye.
David Mitchell
#16. Don't draw the line before stupidity. It'll take it as a start.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#17. To be thoroughly modern, an aphorism should trail off vaguely rather than coming to a point.
Mason Cooley
#18. To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.
Saki
#19. The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.
Emile M. Cioran
#22. The eleventh commandment of art: thou shalt not be boring.
W.M. Driscoll
#24. Happiness can not be prescribed, postponed or preserved.
Relish its unpredictability. Cherish its exclusivity. Accept its brevity. But above all savour its delicious exquisiteness. Do not let it go cold!
Dimity Powell
#26. The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the physician's aphorism, and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it.
Thomas Carlyle
#28. An aphorism is a single sentence that totally exhausts its subject.
Robert Breault
#30. Santayana's aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#31. (Shake an aphorism, he said, and in most cases a lie falls out, leaving only a banality.)
Clive James
#33. An aphorism that does not score is just one more sentence.
Mason Cooley
#34. An ignorant man who is regarded as knowledgeable by people who are more ignorant than him is still ignorant.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#35. An aphorism is a synthesis of poetry and prose, it is a narrative precipitate, a didactic parable, an ideological concept, in practice it 's compressed and zipped philosophy . It is literature that adapts itself to the digital age.
William C. Brown
#36. Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice illustration of the precept, that "Whatever is right;" an aphorism that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.
Charles Dickens
#37. It wasn't until I had been writing on and off for maybe ten years that I started to establish any kind of routine, thought I couldn't put a finger on an exact date, and this routine relates simply to the aphorism 'How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.'
Neal Asher
#38. You have the chance to remain silent. Everything you say will be misused.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#41. Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#45. The aphorism sometimes casts off cynicism and expresses strong feeling.
Mason Cooley
#47. Most people are willing to promise you a lot. A few are those who can promise you a little, just as much as they can.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#48. Many people know they're working, but not what they're working.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#49. I am not the potter, not the potter's wheel, but the potter's clay; is not the value of the shape attained as dependent upon the intrinsic worth of the clay as upon the wheel and the Master's skill?
Stephen King
#50. The striking aphorism requires a stricken aphorist.
Alfred Polgar
#51. It is a sign of immaturity to believe that being older than someone (automatically) makes you more (mentally) mature than them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#53. 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
#54. An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.
Karl Kraus
#55. The quoting of an aphorism, like the angry barking of a dog or the smell of overcooked broccoli, rarely indicates that something helpful is about to happen.
Lemony Snicket
#56. We have the highest authority for believing that the meek shall inherit the earth; though I have never found any particular corroboration of this aphorism in the records of Somerset House.
F. E. Smith, 1st Earl Of Birkenhead
#58. There are 31.536.000 seconds in a year. I am counting down every second.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#60. After ten standard months I was done, acknowledging the ancient aphorism to the effect that no book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.
Dan Simmons
#61. There is music you never hear unless you play it yourself.
Marty Rubin
#62. If I may paraphrase Hobbes's well-known aphorism, I would say that 'books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.
Thomas Henry Huxley
#63. APHORISM, n. Predigested wisdom. The flabby wine-skin of his brain Yields to some pathologic strain, And voids from its unstored abysm The driblet of an aphorism. "The Mad Philosopher," 1697
Ambrose Bierce
#64. Academic writers are bad writers for three reasons. First, they want to sound smart. "If the water is dark," goes a German aphorism, "the lake must be deep." Instead of using good words like smart, they choose sophisticated or erudite.
Paul J. Silvia
#65. All of us encounter, at least once in our life, some individual who utters words that make us think forever. There are men whose phrases are oracles; who condense in one sentence the secrets of life; who blurt out an aphorism that forms a character or illustrates an existence.
Benjamin Disraeli
#67. Give a man a proverb
and he'll muse for a moment.
Teach a man to find the verb in every proverb
and he'll walk in wisdom for a lifetime.
Cameron Semmens
#69. An aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general.
Stefan Kanfer
#70. Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.
Karl Kraus
#71. Beware of finding what you're looking for.
[A favorite aphorism he often used.]
Richard Hamming
#72. Aphorisms may equivocate, but they must not wobble.
Mason Cooley
#73. A sentimental aphorism is even more a surprise than a hard- boiled sonnet.
Mason Cooley
#75. I will never do this, says one, yet does it: I am resolved to do this, says another; but flags upon second Thoughts: Or does it, tho' awkwardly, for his Word's sake: As if it were worse to break his Word, than to do amiss in keeping it.
William Penn
#76. A coward is a servant of his fears.
A hero enslaves his fears.
Lera Auerbach
#77. The aphorism: a platitude that swerves, or slides all the way around.
Mason Cooley
#78. Finding a thought for an aphorism is not hard. Putting a kink in its tail is the hard part.
Mason Cooley
#79. The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.
Elias Canetti
#80. The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia
Pete Hamill
#82. Each of us is like all of us and like no one else.
Kamand Kojouri
#83. What is a normal goal to a young person becomes a neurotic hindrance in old age. - CARL JUNG No wise person ever wanted to be younger. - NATIVE AMERICAN APHORISM
Richard Rohr
#84. There is a perfect marriage. Any marriage counselor can tell you that.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#85. It's only words... unless they're true.
David Mamet
#86. Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window
Steve Wozniak
#87. Luckily we don't sleep standing. Who knows where the dream will take us!
Ljupka Cvetanova
#88. The lyric deals with love and sorrow, the aphorism with contradiction and deceit.
Mason Cooley
#91. Culture is a symbolic veil with which we hide our animal nature from ourselves ... and other animals.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#93. If Socrates was alive today he would say : I know that I know everything. That's what contemporary philosophers do.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#95. I believe instinct's the iron skeleton under all our ideas of free will. Unless you're willing to take the pipe or eat the gun or take a long walk off a short dock, you can't say no to some things. You can't refuse to pick up your option because there is no option.
Stephen King
#97. The aphorism is already a shadow of itself.
Don Paterson
#98. 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
#100. What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words ... Be not the slave of Words ...
Thomas Carlyle
