Exemplum Quotes & Sayings

What destruction have I been blessed by? — A.R. Ammons

They will have the World to be in Large, what a Watch is in Small; which is very regular, and depends only upon the just disposing of the several Parts of the Movement. — Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle

I would be perfectly willing if a publisher came up to me and said, "I need a novel about underwater Nazi cheerleaders and it has to be 309 pages long and I need fourteen chapters and a prologue. — Michael McDowell

The illustration which solves one difficulty by raising another, settles nothing.
[Lat., Nil agit exemplum, litem quod lite resolvit.] — Horace

Nothing can be found in the intellect if previously has not been found in the senses. — Michael Servetus

You are certainly wrong to compare suicide ... with great accomplishments, since it cannot be considered as anything but a weakness. After all, it is easier to die than to endure a harrowing life with fortitude. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

But like all things, the business has two sides. Clean white teeth are not always wise, now are they? Par exemplum: when I was in the Congo, the only way I could identify the nigger was by the whiteness of his teeth, if you see what I mean. Horrid business. Dark as buggery, it was. And they died because of it, you see? Poor bastards. Or rather I survived, to look at it in another way, do you see? — Zadie Smith

Hugh refused to leave the scene of the action. He seated himself on the top stair in the hall, banged his head against the railing a few times, just by way of uncorking the vials of his wrath, and then subsided into gloomy silence, waiting to declare war if more "first girl babies" were thrust upon a family already surfeited with that unnecessary article. — Kate Douglas Wiggin

Children are often like hostages under the care of authority, with spankings and groundings nudging them like guns pointed at their skulls, threatening to shoot if the wrong words are uttered. — Maggie Young

I told you this would happen. But, no, you had to go for the buffet, didn't you? — Mark Twain

Huh," groaned Father Gabe. "I sympathize with you, Tommy. Relationships can be a crap shoot. You think you're going to roll a seven and up pops snake eyes. — Robert Hobkirk