Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
I'm interested in the economy of words and forms: jokes, aphorisms, copywriting, advertising, that way of writing when meaning has to be squeezed into as few words as possible.
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."
A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny.
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.
I got a note from my father, who said that Success is wonderful, if you don't inhale. That was his own aphorism, and I think it's the very best thing he could have said to me or anyone else on the subject.
I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.
I compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms - they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I'm surprised by the high, poetic quality of Twitter - it lends itself to a surreal sort of self-expression.
While the interests of the business are served by the aphorism 'Don't just stand there. Do something!' the interests of investors are served by an approach that is its diametrical opposite: 'Don't do something. Just stand there!'
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.'
Conservatives are often fond of La Rochefoucauld's famous aphorism that 'Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue,' and so tend to downplay hypocrisy as a sin. But in the marketplace of ideas they champion, hypocrisy may yet turn out to be the deadliest - or costliest - of sins.
There's a classic medical aphorism: 'Listen to the patient; they're telling you the diagnosis.' Actually, a lot of patients are just telling you a lot of rubbish, and you have to stop them and ask the pertinent questions. But, yes, in both drama and medicine, isolated facts can accumulate to create the narrative.
