Quotes on Epigrams

The object of a comedy is not to correct morals or ridicule the vices of society; no, a comedy should depict the discrepancies between life and purpose, should be the fruit of bitter indignation aroused by the degradation of human dignity, should be sarcasm, and not an epigram, convulsive laughter and not an amused grin, should be written with bile and not diluted salt, in a word, it should embrace life in its highest significance.

Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand.

EPIGRAM, n. A short, sharp saying in prose or verse, frequently characterize by acidity or acerbity and sometimes by wisdom.

I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the 'Yale News.'—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.' This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

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

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

To see a world in a grain of sand_x000D_ And a heaven in a wild flower,_x000D_ Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,_x000D_ And eternity in an hour.

You complain, friend Swift, of the length of my epigrams, but you yourself write nothing. Yours are shorter.

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'

Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.