Top 100 Aphorism Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. We often feel that a clever aphorism captures a truth that would require pages to defend in any other way.
Steven Pinker
#6. 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
#7. To be thoroughly modern, an aphorism should trail off vaguely rather than coming to a point.
Mason Cooley
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. An aphorism is a single sentence that totally exhausts its subject.
Robert Breault
#11. 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.
#12. (Shake an aphorism, he said, and in most cases a lie falls out, leaving only a banality.)
Clive James
#13. An aphorism that does not score is just one more sentence.
Mason Cooley
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. The aphorism sometimes casts off cynicism and expresses strong feeling.
Mason Cooley
#18. The striking aphorism requires a stricken aphorist.
Alfred Polgar
#19. 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
#20. An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.
Karl Kraus
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. An aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general.
Stefan Kanfer
#29. Beware of finding what you're looking for.
[A favorite aphorism he often used.]
Richard Hamming
#30. A sentimental aphorism is even more a surprise than a hard- boiled sonnet.
Mason Cooley
#31. The aphorism: a platitude that swerves, or slides all the way around.
Mason Cooley
#32. Finding a thought for an aphorism is not hard. Putting a kink in its tail is the hard part.
Mason Cooley
#33. 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
#34. The lyric deals with love and sorrow, the aphorism with contradiction and deceit.
Mason Cooley
#35. The aphorism is already a shadow of itself.
Don Paterson
#36. 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
#37. The perfect aphorism would achieve classical balance and then immediately upset it.
Mason Cooley
#38. I got a note from my father, who said that Success is wonderful, if you don't inhale. That was his own aphorism, and I think it's the very best thing he could have said to me or anyone else on the subject.
Sam Waterston
#39. The trick to writing an aphorism is to place a period at the point where you're inclined to say, in other words ...
Robert Breault
#40. I do not know to whom the aphorism 'There are no sound studies, only ones that haven't been busted yet' belongs, but it has measure of truth in it.
Mark Dvoretsky
#42. (A frequent Eric aphorism during financial discussions: "Revenue solves all known problems.")
Eric Schmidt
#43. How many of us have been attracted to reason; first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
#44. truth cannot "be reduced to aphorism or formulas. It is something alive and unpronounceable. Story creates an atmosphere in which [truth] becomes discernible as a pattern."3
Parker J. Palmer
#45. aphorism 129:
I would have every thought stoop and touch the Earth but that I already know the impossibility of the effort. A thought seems to have a life of its own and would rather leave itself open to flattering interpretations.
Matt Berry
#46. How many of us have been first attracted to reason, first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism from Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere.
Bill Vaughan
#47. In an aphorism, aptness counts for more than truth.
Mason Cooley
#48. We endeavor to stuff the universe into the gullet of an aphorism.
Paul Eldridge
#49. An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.
Emil Cioran
#50. Writing an upbeat aphorism is a temptation, but decorum forbids.
Mason Cooley
#51. I remember another aphorism of my father's, one that he used to say whenever we passed someone pissing openly in the street: add color to life when you can.
Dinaw Mengestu
#52. An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
Friedrich Von Schlegel
#53. Always be civil to the girls, you never know who they may marry' is a aphorism which has saved many an English spinster from being treated like an Indian widow.
Nancy Mitford
#54. Belief in form, but disbelief in content - that's what makes an aphorism charming.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#55. The First Aphorism of Religion Cases: Only the religious convictions of other people are weird. Yours are perfectly rational.
Dahlia Lithwick
#56. An aphorism is a generalization, therefore not modern.
John Fowles
#57. aphorism 90:
I am incorrigible. I would have every object of the universe mechanically predictable but myself.
Matt Berry
#58. The aphorism "If you want something done, ask a busy woman" is in direct acknowledgment of the efficiency boot camp parenthood puts you through.
Caitlin Moran
#59. The interest in Wisdom is fading. Soon there will not be enough left to support the aphorism, even though it tries to amuse by half-mocking the Wisdom it propounds.
Mason Cooley
#60. An aphorism is a mental exercise, psychical, logical, linguistic, spiritual, ritual, emotional and rational, it is a major conceptual and literary activity, a mixture of prose and poetry that conveys, in addition to ideology, sympathy or antipathy.
William C. Brown
#61. Dan thought of another AA aphorism: We're powerless over people, places, and things. Like most alkie nuggets, it was seventy percent true and thirty percent rah-rah bullshit.
Stephen King
#62. We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth."
John Keats
#63. Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow. - Popular aphorism.
Jack Vance
#64. Alan Kay's famous aphorism is that perspective is worth 80 IQ points. An innovative insight is not the product of an individual's brilliance. It's not as if innovators' heads are wired in different ways. Innovation typically comes from looking at the world through a slightly different lens.
Gary Hamel
#66. My premise is that the popular aphorism that 'all religions are fundamentally the same and only superficially different' simply is not true. It is more correct to say that all religions are, at best, superficially similar but fundamentally different.
Ravi Zacharias
#67. There is, however, only one idea of duty which has been universally accepted by all mankind, of all ages and sects and countries, and that has been summed up in a Sanskrit aphorism thus: "Do not injure any being; not injuring any being is virtue, injuring any being is sin."
Swami Vivekananda
#68. The aphorism wants to be at the same time both main line and off beat.
Mason Cooley
#69. There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism.
Umberto Eco
#71. The haiku lets meaning float; the aphorism pins it down.
Mason Cooley
#73. The aphorism offers a momentary sense of mastery over some confusion or unhappiness.
Mason Cooley
#74. An aphorism needn't be true, but it should sound true.
Marty Rubin
#75. It is an aphorism in physic, that unwholesome airs, because perpetually sucked into the lungs, do distemper health more than coarser diet used but at set times. The like may be said of society, which, if good, is a better refiner of the spirits than ordinary books.
Frances Osborne
#76. Aphorism, n.: A concise, clever statement you don't think of until too late.
James Alexander Thom
#77. An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
Anatole Broyard
#78. Think of Big Mac's aphorism: In order to have sex, women need to feel loved; but in order for men to feel loved, we need to have sex.
David Mitchell
#79. The laughter of the aphorism is sometimes triumphant, but seldom carefree.
Mason Cooley
#81. One cannot dictate an aphorism to a typist. It would take too long.
Karl Kraus
#82. The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom among us is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority...
Thomas Stockman
#83. Never put off until tomorrow that which may be avoided entirely.
Bill McKean
#84. A painting is worth a thousand confused art-gallery visitors.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#88. I will take all my rights! Can you deliver them to my house?
Ljupka Cvetanova
#89. 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
#90. Aphorisms know the angles, but not the structure.
Mason Cooley
#91. Don't draw the line before stupidity. It'll take it as a start.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#92. To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.
Saki
#95. The eleventh commandment of art: thou shalt not be boring.
W.M. Driscoll
#97. 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
