Top 86 Quotes About Epigram
#1. Lucy was slow to follow what people said, but quick enough to detect what they meant. She missed Cecil's epigram, but grasped the feeling that prompted it.
E. M. Forster
#2. 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
#3. An epigram is only a wisecrack that's played at Carnegie Hall.
Oscar Levant
#5. When guys gnash their teeth and knit their brows in a broody, furious expression, it means they have found their soulmate.
The Harvard Lampoon
#6. Man is mostly a collection of emotions, most of which he would do better not to be feeling.
Neel Burton
#7. I think, therefore I am. My fingers that caress these rose and frangipani petals are a result of my thoughts. I feel content, tender. I feel entranced, ecstatic and besotted by the fragrance of the flowers and this is because of my thoughts.
Mohamed Latiff Mohamed
#8. The other day I made an epigram. I said, Anni's beauty is only sin-deep. I hope that's original? Is it? Please laugh.
Christopher Isherwood
#9. 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
#10. The mass of the people regard as profound only him who suggests pungent contradictions of the general idea. In ratiocination, not less than in literature, it is the epigram which is the most immediately and the most universally appreciated. In both, it is of the lowest order of merit.
Edgar Allan Poe
#11. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think.
G.K. Chesterton
#12. The Athenians, front-fighters of the Greeks, at Marathon destroyed the power of the gold-bearing Medes.
Simonides
#13. Stories now, to suit a public taste, must be half epigram, half pleasant vice.
James Russell Lowell
#14. One day, I decided to be an island. I took off my clothes and walked into the sea, then floated there, bobbing along with the tide, suspended by my inflatable tube and water wings.
Ng Yi-Sheng
#16. An epigram is a flashlight of a truth; a witticism, truth laughing at itself.
Minna Antrim
#17. Nothing is so pleasant ... as to display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a trifle tedious to hear another person display theirs.
Ouida
#18. An epigram is a half-truth so stated as to irritate the person who believes the other half.
Shailer Mathews
#19. 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
#21. I was in this on my own - it was make it or break it.
Bjorn Shen
#22. But we will not bury our mother. We have no interest in putting her bones in soft ground, no desire for memorials and platitudes, no feelings attached to the organic detritus of her terminated existence.
JY Yang
#23. The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.
Don Marquis
#24. In a few years, it is very likely that this series will be considered a milestone in the history of Singapore photography.
Raphael Millet
#25. Where have all the flowers of old Singapore gone? Gone, one would imagine, with the old folks and homes
Thien
#26. Any moment now, I thought, he was going to wake up. Any moment.
O Thiam Chin
#27. Behold, as a wild ass in the desert, go I forth to my work.
Frank Herbert
#29. The Reformation has been called in a biting epigram "a rising of the rich against the poor."
Hilaire Belloc
#30. Words ... To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.
Seamus Heaney
#31. 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
#32. Mongkol, poor Mongkol, shedding tears.
Thinking of his smiling, comical face, and his dreams of sending his son to university, I could only lower my head in silence.
And the night continued, cold and dark, the wind frozen beyond the mountains.
You Jin
#33. Pak Karman hugged his wife's gravestone tightly. "You left without saying farewell!" The whole of the graveyard was ablaze with light.
Mohamed Latiff Mohamed
#35. He had used it as the epigram to his 1967 book 'To Seek a Newer World,' and it expressed two pillars of his faith: that everyone has a duty to alleviate suffering, and that no one can live a fully happy life while surrounded by the unaddressed misery of others.
Thurston Clarke
#36. We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
Oscar Wilde
#37. I am mistaken if a single epigram included fails to preserve at least some faint thrill of the emotion through which it had to pass before the Muse's lips let it fall, with however exquisite deliberation.
Arthur Quiller-Couch
#38. No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'
C.S. Lewis
#39. It is an old saying, "A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword"; and many men are as much galled with a calumny, a scurrile and bitter jest, a libel, a pasquil, satire, apologue, epigram, stage-plays, or the like, as with any misfortune whatsoever.
Robert Burton
#40. I like men who have a future and women who have a past.
Oscar Wilde
#41. Many years later, Sophia will think of this night, and how close she was to tears. She will wonder how she could have allowed herself to arrive there, but also feel a twinge of loss for the girl still capable of losing control.
Jeremy Tiang
#42. The four of us got back into the car. In an instant, I distinctly heard a "soundless music". It was the melody of friendship, the sound of a perfectly tuned quartet who got together by chance, four hearts playing in harmony.
You Jin
#43. Whenever he gives advice it is always something as startling as an epigram, and yet as practical as the Bank of England.
G.K. Chesterton
#44. 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
#45. Better a lively old epigram than a deadly new one.
Helen Rowland
#46. 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
#47. Life opened up in one if its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: 'Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.' On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#48. I'd thought there'd be no winter in the desert, but winter arrived anyway - silently, suddenly.
You Jin
#49. An epigram is but a feeble thing - With straw in tail, stuck there by way of sting.
William Cowper
#50. Look, Cha Cha!" says Bo Bo.
"We're here at our new home!"
Cha Cha shrugs her shoulders as she takes her first look at the Mandai Zoo.
Jason Erik Lundberg
#51. [On Oscar Wilde:]
If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.
[Life Magazine, June 2, 1927]
Dorothy Parker
#52. Lim Oh Kee kills himself in the early hours on the 12th day of December, 1921. His last meal is rice and nothing.
Evan Adam Ang
#53. White froth bubbles from the mouth of Chow Sze Teck. The airconditioner is still running and the room is dark. Slumped over the mahogany desk in his study, the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Housing is, as always, immaculately dressed.
Wong Souk Yee
#54. EPIGRAM, n. A short, sharp saying in prose or verse, frequently characterize by acidity or acerbity and sometimes by wisdom.
Ambrose Bierce
#55. The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out.
Oscar Wilde
#56. Every epigram should resemble a bee; it should have sting, honey, and brevity.
Martial
#57. 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
#58. All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.
Delmore Schwartz
#59. The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.
Oscar Wilde
#60. As the wind continued to howl and groan through her decaying body, she began to sing her story.
Ken Liu
#61. Victorian society was homogeneous without being homogenized. It was, to paraphrase the epigram about Parliament, a society of extreme eccentrics who agreed so well that they could afford to differ.
Kenneth Rexroth
#62. I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful
Oscar Wilde
#63. If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it.
Morrissey
#65. There were three things Gimme Lao did not know about himself.
Sebastian Sim
#66. I remember clearly the afternoon that she stood at the corner beside the door of the tourist centre in Gdansk.
You Jin
#67. 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
#68. Audiences are always better pleased with a smart retort, some joke or epigram, than with any amount of reasoning.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#69. So Artichoke was a restaurant borne out of impulse and recklessness. Four years on, it's also a testament to how an enterprise started on such a fucked up approach can actually succeed.
Bjorn Shen
#70. Some learned writers ... have compared a Scorpion to an Epigram ... because as the sting of the Scorpion lyeth in the tayl, so the force and virtue of an epigram is in the conclusion.
Edward Topsell
#71. An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#72. Feminine passion is to masculine as an epic is to an epigram.
Karl Kraus
#73. I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.
William James
#75. It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.
Soren Kierkegaard
#78. When God will chastise a man, He first of all deprives him of his reason ...
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#79. 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
#81. You can cram a truth into an epigram - the truth, never.
Norman Douglas
#82. The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram; and the proverbs of nations, which embody the commonsense of nations, have the brisk concussion of the most sparkling wit.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#83. Someone I flattered in a book pretends he owes me nothing. Oh the trash I have for friends.
- Martial (40 AD - 104 AD), Epigram V, xxxvi
Marcus Valerius Martialis
#84. An epigram is the marriage of wit and wisdom; a wisecrack, their divorce.
Evan Esar
#85. But what little we did know, we brandished wildly like cavemen's clubs, slinging out stuff we felt tasted good. That was as intricate as our
game plan ever was - to make food that tasted good.
Bjorn Shen
#86. She looked at me like I was stupid, the same look the girls in JC used to give me when I hadn't heard of the latest boy band, or turned up at Zouk wearing unfashionable clothes.
Jeremy Tiang
