Top 100 Quotes About Aphorisms
#1. (Emerson's) aphorisms tend to be chicken soup for the academic soul or gobledygook of a man who prefers the sounds of words to their meanings.
Micah Mattix
#2. I compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms - they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I'm surprised by the high, poetic quality of Twitter - it lends itself to a surreal sort of self-expression.
Joyce Carol Oates
#3. Some say men continually war against circumstances, but I say they perpetually flee. What are the works of men if not a momentary respite, a hiding place soon to be discovered by catastrophe? Life is endless flight before the hunter we call the world. - EKYANNUS VIII, 111 APHORISMS Spring,
R. Scott Bakker
#4. Aphorisms know the angles, but not the structure.
Mason Cooley
#5. Aphorisms are food for thought - like sushi, they come in small portions that are both delicious and exquisitely formed. And, like sushi, I can never get enough.
James Geary
#6. He's over your head! He was, but naturally I'd flung myself into the Sea of Voltaire anyway and emerged with nothing more than several aphorisms.
Sue Monk Kidd
#8. Good places for aphorisms: in fortune cookies, on bumper stickers, and on banners flying over the Palace of Free Advice.
Mason Cooley
#9. The business of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable was one of the aphorisms his boss liked to quote.
Sara Gruen
#11. I wrote my first two long novels and an anthology of short narratives, when I was a manager of my own jazz bar. There was not enough time to write and I didn't know how to write novels. Therefore, I made written collages of aphorisms and rags.
Haruki Murakami
#12. Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.
Karl Kraus
#13. Aphorisms may equivocate, but they must not wobble.
Mason Cooley
#14. Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
W. H. Auden
#15. The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.
Elias Canetti
#16. The young people who come to me in the hope of hearing me utter a few memorable maxims are quite disappointed. Aphorisms are not my forte, I say nothing but banalities ... I listen to them and they go away delighted.
Andre Gide
#17. Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms wants not to be learned but to be learned by heart.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#18. Pop leadership abuts pop psychology, and is very destructive. In no other serious domain of human endeavor (surgery, playing the violin) is the subject distilled down to nice-sounding aphorisms that mean nothing.
Paul Gibbons
#19. There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
Vladimir Nabokov
#20. 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
#21. What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words ... Be not the slave of Words ...
Thomas Carlyle
#22. 'Character, says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms - character is destiny'.
George Eliot
#23. On the last day, when the general examination takes place, there will be no question at all on the text of Aristotle, the aphorisms of Hippocrates, or the paragraphs of Justinian. Charity will be the whole syllabus.
Robert Bellarmine
#24. Despite popular conviction, a writer needn't wear black, be unshaven, sickly and parade around New York's East Village spewing aphorisms and scaring children.
Noah Lukeman
#25. A man of fashion never has recourse to proverbs, and vulgar aphorisms; uses neither favourite words nor hard words, but takes great care to speak very correctly and grammatically, and to pronounce properly; that is, according to the usage of the best companies.
Lord Chesterfield
#26. The world is boiled down to aphorisms and fairy tales.
Claire North
#27. Age certainly hadn't conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russian writers have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.
Haruki Murakami
#28. I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.
Zadie Smith
#29. As child, when the elders spoke their wise words, it only echoes in my ears. As adult, I have crystal clear insight to the wise aphorisms by the elderly.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#30. Tweets are not diseased rings of glitchy minds. They're epigrams, aphorisms, maxims, dictums, taglines, captions, slogans, and adages. Some are art, some are commercial; these are forms with integrity.
Virginia Heffernan
#31. 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
#32. Fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege.
Terry Pratchett
#33. Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed." "I don't think I am likely to marry, Harry. I am too much in love. That is one of your aphorisms. I am putting it into practice, as I do everything that you say.
Oscar Wilde
#34. It is not my place to offer pep talks, aphorisms, or dictums. But if I had to give one piece of practical advice it would be this: Find something that you love that they're fucking with and then fight for it. If everyone did that--imagine the difference. (50)
David Gessner
#35. The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.
F.H. Bradley
#36. Maxims and aphorisms, let us remember that wisdom is the true salt of literature, and the books that are most nourishing are richly stored with it, and that is the main object to seek in reading books.
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley Of Blackburn
#37. In function, Jesus's aphorisms are very much like his parables - provocative and invitational forms of speech. They provoke thought, lead people to reconsider their taken-for-granted assumptions, and invite them to see life differently.
Marcus J. Borg
#38. I believe aphorisms are best when first read in the wild, free from the confines of any categories.
James Geary
#39. The excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some useful truth in a few words.
Samuel Johnson
#40. Hmm,' said the King. 'I must write that down in my book of aphorisms. I don't know if it is deep, but it sounds deep.
Stephen Mitchell
#41. Aphorisms are not true or false, but pointed or flat.
Mason Cooley
#42. Aphorisms are literature's hand luggage. Light and compact, they fit easily into the overhead compartment of your brain.
James Geary
#43. There is so much poetry, and yet nothing is more rare than a poetic work. This is what the masses make out of poetical sketches, studies, aphorisms, trends, ruins, and raw material.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#44. Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
Anatole Broyard
#45. Exactly. The most convincing argument doesn't come from pithy sayings or aphorisms, but through stories. A clear line of causality, from one event to the next, that seems to be leading to an inevitable conclusion." "We are fighting our guerrilla war battle by battle.
Edward W. Robertson
#46. I collect axioms, paradoxes, maxims, teaching stories, proverbs, and aphorisms of all sorts, because I love to see complex ideas distilled into a few words.
Gretchen Rubin
#47. He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#48. If you mean to know yourself, interline such of these aphorisms as affect you agreeably in reading, and set a mark to such as left a sense of uneasiness with you; and then show your copy to whom you please.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#49. Aphorisms have never seduced anybody, but they have fooled some into considering themselves worldly-wise.
Mason Cooley
#50. When the enemy of my enemy is willing to use plasma weapons inside a hotel, I think I can do better than stupid aphorisms, General.
-Captain Kevyn Andreyasn
Howard Tayler
#51. Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
Northrop Frye
#52. One of the aphorisms occurred to me now and I wrote it under the picture: "Fate and temperament are two words for one and the same concept." That was clear to me now.
Hermann Hesse
#54. Concerning days on which to rest, Sundays are rather apt. Other good days are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
Euphrates Arnaut Moss
#57. Free will is like fallen
leaves agreeing to be
where they are.
Salamanca
#58. A painting is worth a thousand confused art-gallery visitors.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#60. Writing is beautiful, like putting on a gold suit and going to sleep in it.
Mark Leidner
#61. 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
#62. For authors, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line only if you are writing the letter I.
Michael A. Arnzen
#63. Don't draw the line before stupidity. It'll take it as a start.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#64. People will never get in touch with democracy. It's always surrounded by bodyguards.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#65. It is infinitely better to know when to stay silent than to know when to speak.
Euphrates Arnaut Moss
#66. If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
Emil Cioran
#67. The fine line between genius and madness is a punch line. Duck, you idiot!
Brian Spellman
#68. Cinderella had to dress up so that the Prince could see her inner beauty.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#69. An ignorant man who is regarded as knowledgeable by people who are more ignorant than him is still ignorant.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#71. They would sweep their poverty under the carpet if only they had one.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#72. 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
#73. It is a sign of immaturity to believe that being older than someone (automatically) makes you more (mentally) mature than them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#75. There are 31.536.000 seconds in a year. I am counting down every second.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#76. Settle down and be Good forever. Find the hardest things to accept in me, and reconcile what I am with what I hope to be.
Jen Wang
#78. Man who has lived through so many storms will either worship the tranquillity or will detest it!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#81. Men and the world are mutually toxic to each other.
Philip K. Dick
#82. Pity is nary a friend you want to invite, nor an acquaintance you would accompany.
Euphrates Arnaut Moss
#83. If you have decided to sail to the sea with great courage and determination, even the storm on the horizon will step aside!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#85. Ambition is the weakness of all the great spirits who in acceptance will find the joy & the despair the seek. The physician can only cure when he is willing to assume your disease. To be shunned is to be God a little...
Kenneth Patchen
#86. The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia
Pete Hamill
#88. Few things are more absurd than wise saws originally designed to inculcate or maintain the social needs of a society long past - when they are applied to today.
Idries Shah
#90. Culture is a symbolic veil with which we hide our animal nature from ourselves ... and other animals.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#94. The aphorism is already a shadow of itself.
Don Paterson
#95. If you aren't sure of the rules then follow them. If you are sure of the rules break them.
Euphrates Arnaut Moss
#99. Only what touches us closely preoccupies us. We prepare in solitude to face it. (The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion)
Edmond Jabes
