Aphorism Quotations

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.

It wasn't until I had been writing on and off for maybe ten years that I started to establish any kind of routine, thought I couldn't put a finger on an exact date, and this routine relates simply to the aphorism 'How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.'

We endeavor to stuff the universe into the gullet of an aphorism.

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

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

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

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

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.

Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.

Santayana's aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.

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.

An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.

The societies of the futures, always searching for salves, will be so greedy to have this capital which is the man, that they will find all sorts of dirty ways to religiously or culturally brutify him and even severely punishing him if he would chose suicide or the ideology that shows the true path of salvation of the mankind through itself. Precisely because they will understand that the Man is the World and the World is the Man! This aphorism will be the one that will be in the foreground on the backgrounds tainted by all these murders of the money of this society which will be the antechamber of the society of the Sacred Self.

It's the danger of the aphorism that it states too much in trying to be small

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

By 2000, he had embarked on an ambitious series of figure paintings, usually captioned with an aphorism from poetry or philosophy, and charged with stark physical and metaphysical deliberations.

An aphorism is true where it has fixed the impression of a genuine experience.

Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow. —Popular aphorism.

I believe aphorisms are best when first read in the wild, free from the confines of any categories.

Always be civil to the girls, you never know who they may marry,

In an aphorism, aptness counts for more than truth.

Aphorisms have never seduced anybody, but they have fooled some into considering themselves worldly-wise.

An aphorism that does not score is just one more sentence.

The aphorism: a platitude that swerves, or slides all the way around.

Aphorisms know the angles, but not the structure.

Aphorisms may equivocate, but they must not wobble.

The haiku lets meaning float; the aphorism pins it down.

Finding a thought for an aphorism is not hard. Putting a kink in its tail is the hard part.

Aphorisms are not true or false, but pointed or flat.

To be thoroughly modern, an aphorism should trail off vaguely rather than coming to a point.

A sentimental aphorism is even more a surprise than a hard- boiled sonnet.

The aphorism is a slippery plaything.

Writing an upbeat aphorism is a temptation, but decorum forbids.

If we couldn't laugh at ourselves, that would be the end of everything.

My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism

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

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

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.

An aphorism is a generalization, therefore not modern.

We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth."

One cannot dictate an aphorism to a typist. It would take too long.

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

An apt aphorism half kills, half immortalizes.

Beware of finding what you're looking for. A favorite aphorism he often used.

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

APHORISM, n. Predigested wisdom.

I have forgotten my umbrella.

A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away by all the centuries, although it serves as food for every epoch.

'Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms - character is destiny'.

Belief in form, but disbelief in content - that's what makes an aphorism charming.

Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 153

What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words.... Be not the slave of Words...

An aphorism is not an aphorism unless you know what it means.