Aphorismus est sermo brevis, integrum sensum propositae rei scribens. That is – An aphorism is a brief utterance, which writes the complete meaning of the matter – this is the exact definition proposed by Isidore de Séville. As a matter of fact an aphorism is usually a saying expressing a belief, an idea, a thought, a saying, a piece of literature and so on. Synonyms for aphorisms could be: adage, apothegm, axiom, dictum, maxim, moral, precept, proverb, rule, saw, saying, truism, axiom, device, dictum, fundamental, law, maxim, moral, postulate, precept, proposition, proverb, saying, theorem, truism, truth, byword, catchphrase, catchword, dictum, epithet, gnome, gnomic saying, handle, maxim, motto, nickname, precept, proverb, quotation, quote, saw, shibboleth, slogan, standing joke. An aphorism can express also absurdity, ambiguity, foolishness, nonsense, amusement and paradox, because it is the king of the metaphorical language.
Carl William Brown
An aphorism is a mental exercise, psychical, logical, linguistic, spiritual, ritual, emotional and rational, it is a major conceptual and literary activity, a mixture of prose and poetry that conveys, in addition to ideology, sympathy or antipathy.
Carl William Brown
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
George Santayana
Life itself is a quotation.
Jorge Luis Borges
The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.
Benjamin Disraeli
Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
E. B. White
By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.
Mark Zuckerberg
They know enough who know how to learn.
Henry Brooks Adams
Formal education will make you a living; self education will make you a fortune.
Jim Rohn
Since we cannot know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned.
John Holt
A great fortune depends on luck, a small one on diligence.
Chinese Proverb
An aphorism is a synthesis of poetry and prose, it is a narrative precipitate, a didactic parable, an ideological concept, in practice it ‘s compressed and zipped philosophy . It is literature that adapts itself to the digital age.
Carl William Brown
An aphorism is nothing else but the slightest form of writing raised to the highest level of expressive communication.
Carl William Brown
An aphorism is an extreme synthesis of thesis and antithesis, theory and practice, it’s a mixture of intuition and observation, hypothesis and illusions of certainty and probability, history and stupidity.
Carl William Brown
Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart’s blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.
Francis H. Bradley
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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
An aphorism is a judgment, a maxim, a sentence that expresses exactly the fruit of a long life experience, observation, analysis, pain in the ass … and so on!
Carl William Brown
There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
Vladimir Nabokov
In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak, but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks: and those to whom they are spoken should be big and tall of stature.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Maxims and aphorisms, let us remember that wisdom is the true salt of literature, and the books that are most nourishing are richly stored with it, and that is the main object to seek in reading books.
John Morely
Quotations
Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general’s sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.
Jean Genet
In the dime stores and bus stations, people talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall.
Bob Dylan
Stay at home in your mind. Don’t recite other people’s opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.
George Eliot
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
James Baldwin
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
Walter Benjamin
Life itself is a quotation.
Jorge Luis Borges
I pick my favorite quotation and store them in my mind as ready armor, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence.
Robert Burns
A quotation, like a pun, should come unsought, and then be welcomed only for some propriety of felicity justifying the intrusion.
Robert Chapman
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read a book of quotations.
Winston Churchill
That is the point of quotations. One can use another’s words to be insulting.
Amanda Cross
The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.
Isaac D’Israeli
Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.
Guy Debord
When we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, and opening quotation is a symphony precluding on the chords those tones we are about to harmonize.
Benjamin Disraeli
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Stronger than an army is a quotation whose time has come.
W. I. E. Gates
I improve on misquotation.
Cary Grant
Quotations (such as have point and lack triteness) from the great old authors are an act of reverence on the part of the quoter, and a blessing to a public grown superficial and external.
Louise Imogen Guiney
Quotations offer one kind of break in what the eye can see, the ear can hear.
Ihab Hassan
Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.
Samuel Johnson
Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.
Samuel Johnson
He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.
Rudyard Kipling
Fidelity to the subject’s thought and to his characteristic way of expressing himself is the sine qua non of journalistic quotation.
Janet Malcolm
Be careful — with quotations, you can damn anything.
Andre Malraux
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
H. L. Mencken
A book that furnishes no quotations is no book — it is a plaything.
Thomas Love Peacock
Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely-read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely.
Hesketh Pearson
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
Lord Peter Wimsey
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats –and one always secretes too much jelly.
Virginia Woolf
In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.
Arthur Miller
A fine quotation is a diamond in the hand of a man of wit and a pebble in the hand of a fool.
Joseph Roux
A quotation at the right moment is like bread to the famished.
The Talmud
In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it’s lyric verse.
Evelyn Waugh
Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
Orson Welles
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Oscar Wilde
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
Lord Peter Wimsey
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats –and one always secretes too much jelly.
Virginia Woolf
In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.
Arthur Miller
