Apothegm Quotes & Sayings

Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong. — H.L. Mencken

People always love and respect characters who speak the truth, even if the truth hurts. — David Duchovny

The apothegm is the most portable form of Truth ... It is thus that the proverb answers where the sermon fails, as a well-charged pistol will do more execution than a whole barrel of gunpowder idly expended in the air. — William Gilmore Simms

The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out. — Oscar Wilde

What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art. — Odilon Redon

The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth. — Lao-Tzu

That extremes beget extremes is an apothegm built on the most profound observation of the human mind. — Charles Caleb Colton

Common sense is not so common. — Voltaire

History without the history of science, to alter slightly an apothegm of Lord Bacon, resembles a statue of Polyphemus without his eye-that very feature being left out which most marks the spirit and life of the person. My own thesis is complementary: science taught ... without a sense of history is robbed of those very qualities that make it worth teaching to the student of the humanities and the social sciences. — I. Bernard Cohen

Your like my own personal brand of heroine. — Stephenie Meyer

Indeed, there is something about reading in a restaurant that is borderline romantic. Leaning back in that corner booth, an evocative title in our hands, a stale cup of java in front of us, every so often bolting forward to jot a phrase onto the napkin, we look like, well, poets-unknown belletrists scraping through the hardscrabble years and awaiting the distinction that is imminent. the waiter of waitress refills our cup, we drop a memorable apothegm or two, share a laugh fraught with meaning, scope out the joint, and return to our tome. Nonbiblioholics strain to espy our title; conversation is struck up on things Kafkaesque and Kierkegaardian; and we forge a genuine biblioholic simpatico with all around. — Tom Raabe

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain. — Lily Tomlin

Heart surgeons do not have the world's smallest egos: when you ask them to name the world's three leading practitioners, they never can remember the names of the other two. — Sara Paretsky

Our actions - and inaction - touch people we may never know and never meet across the globe. — Jacqueline Novogratz

The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know. — Michel Legrand

But what do you say if you're asked a direct question and you can't tell the truth and you can't tell a lie?'
'You say "how very interesting" and change the subject. — Dick Francis

Gertrude Stein maintained that one wrote for oneself and for strangers, a superb recognition that I would extend into a parallel apothegm: one reads for oneself and for strangers. The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called "aesthetic dignity." One of the ineluctable stigmata of the canonical is aesthetic dignity, which is not to be hired. — Harold Bloom

You can't buy happiness — Kurt Cobain

those who are weak enough to think this a degrading task, and the time and labour which have been devoted to it misemployed, I shall content myself with opposing the authority of the greatest man of any age, JULIUS CAeSAR, of whom Bacon observes, that 'in his book of Apothegms which he collected, we see that he esteemed it more honour to make himself but a pair of tables, to take the wise and pithy words of others, than to have every word of his own to be made an apothegm or an oracle.' Having said thus much by way of introduction, I commit the following pages to the candour of the Publick. — Anonymous

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

To keep your resolve, surround yourself with those who want you to succeed. The brain cannot do its job of protecting the body without contact with other people. — Robert E. Ornstein

Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise. — Victor Hugo