Words matter. These are the best Aphorism Quotes from famous people such as Joyce Carol Oates, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Vladimir Nabokov, Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton, James Geary, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
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.
I believe aphorisms are best when first read in the wild, free from the confines of any categories.
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.
The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.
The laughter of the aphorism is sometimes triumphant, but seldom carefree.
I can always go back to Jane Austen. ‘Mansfield Park’ is full of wise aphorisms and relevant observations of people.
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.
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.
Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart’s blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.
While the interests of the business are served by the aphorism ‘Don’t just stand there. Do something!’ the interests of investors are served by an approach that is its diametrical opposite: ‘Don’t do something. Just stand there!’
Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.
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.
Conservatives are often fond of La Rochefoucauld’s famous aphorism that ‘Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue,’ and so tend to downplay hypocrisy as a sin. But in the marketplace of ideas they champion, hypocrisy may yet turn out to be the deadliest – or costliest – of sins.
There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism.
We endeavor to stuff the universe into the gullet of an aphorism.
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.
