Aphorisms Quotes

To read more than a few aphorisms at once is like continuing to water the lawn once it is fully saturated. The excess reading just runs off without soaking, in the same way excess watering runs off the soil.

The best aphorisms are pointed expressions of the results of observation, experience, and reflection. They are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling.

Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing.

Adage, n. Boned wisdom for weak teeth.

Aphorism, n. Predigested wisdom.

Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigram.  Our heart's blood, as we write with it, turns to mere dull ink.

How many of us have been incited to reason, have first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism.

All great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.

The largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms.

The aphorism is a slippery plaything.

The aphorism offers a momentary sense of mastery over some confusion or unhappiness.

The best aphorisms are poems or novels in capsule form.

The aphorisms of one generation become the clichés of the next.

Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.

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 a sentence the secrets of life; who blurt out an aphorism that forms a character, or illustrates an existence.

Aphorisms give you more for your time and money than any other literary form.  Only the poem comes near to it, but then most good poems either start off from an aphorism or arrive at one.

An aphorism is the last link in a long chain of thought.

We should treat them not as food but as condiments, not to sufficiency but for delight.

Windbags can be right.  Aphorists can be wrong.  It is a tough world.

Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.

Aphorisms are literature's hand luggage.  Light and compact, they fit easily into the overhead compartment of your brain.

Like a good joke, a good aphorism has a punch line, a quick verbal or psychological flip, a sudden sting in the tail that gives you a jolt.

Aphorisms are literary loners, set apart from the world because they're worlds unto themselves. They're like porcupines, bristling with prickly philosophical spines.  Rub them the wrong way and you're in for a surprise.

Like sushi, aphorisms come in small portions, are exquisitely formed, and always leave you wanting more.

The aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general.

Aphorisms are the blossoms of thought. They may depend on stalk and soil, but their beauty is independent of those prerequisites.

An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.

An aphorism need not be true, but it should surpass the truth. It must go beyond it with one leap.

Aphorisms respect the wisdom of silence by disturbing it, but briefly.

An aphorism
should be
like a burr;
sting,
...
and leave
a little soreness.

An apt aphorism half kills, half immortalizes.

Aphorism: A little window with a big view.

Short Flights.

The essence of aphorism is the compression of a mass of thought into a single saying...it is good sense brought to a point.

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

Certain brief sentences are peerless in their ability to give one the feeling that nothing remains to be said.

An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.

Aphorisms are salted and not sugared almonds at Reason's feast.

An aphorism is a one-line novel.