These aphorism quotes will inspire you. Aphorism, a concise statement of a principle or a concise statement of a scientific principle, typically by an ancient classical author.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging aphorism quotes, aphorism sayings, and aphorism proverbs.
Best Aphorism Quotes
- “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.” ~ Sam Waterston
- “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
- “Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart’s blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.” ~ F. H. Bradley
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“An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.” ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
- “How many of us have been attracted to reason; first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism.” ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
- “How many of us have been first attracted to reason, first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism from Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere.” ~ Bill Vaughan
- “There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.” ~ Vladimir Nabokov
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“Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader’s teeth.” ~ Anatole Broyard
- “Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.” ~ Karl Kraus
- “The aphorism, the apothegm, in which I am the first among the Germans to be a master, are the forms of “eternity”; it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does not say in a book.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.” ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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“The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.” ~ Elias Canetti
- “An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.” ~ Karl Kraus
- “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.” ~ Emile M. Cioran
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“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.”” ~ John Keats
- “APHORISM, n. Predigested wisdom. The flabby wine-skin of his brain Yields to some pathologic strain, And voids from its unstored abysm The driblet of an aphorism. “The Mad Philosopher,” 1697″ ~ Ambrose Bierce
- “An aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general.” ~ Stefan Kanfer
- “Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 153” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
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“Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.” ~ Mark Twain
- “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- “Worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe.” ~ Mark Twain
- “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” ~ Isaac Asimov
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“When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.” ~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko
- “Experience comes from bad judgment.” ~ Mark Twain
- “And the meek shall inherit the earth.” ~ Geddy Lee
- “Always be civil to the girls, you never know who they may marry.” ~ Nancy Mitford
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“The weak can never forgive.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
- “Hit the nail on the head.” ~ John Heywood
- “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
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“If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.” ~ James Thurber
- “It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “All complaining comes from pride.” ~ Joyce Meyer
- “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” ~ Roald Dahl
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“The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “Be realistic, demand the impossible!” ~ Che Guevara
- “What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.” ~ Thomas Cranmer
- “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” ~ Confucius
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“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “He who has rejected his demons badgers us to death with his angels” ~ Henri Michaux
- “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” ~ George Orwell
- “Young people of high school age can actually feel themselves changing. Progress is almost tangible. It’s exciting. It stimulates more progress. Nevertheless, growth is not constant and smooth. Erik Erikson quotes an aphorism to describe the formless forming of it. “I ain’t what I ought to be. I ain’t what I’m going to be, but I’m not what I was.” ~ Stella Chess
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“An ancient Vedic aphorism says, “Infinite flexibility is the secret to immortality.” When we cultivate flexibility in or consciousness, we renew ourselves in every moment and reverse the aging process.” ~ Deepak Chopra
- “An apt aphorism half kills, half immortalizes.” ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
- “Aphorisms know the angles, but not the structure.” ~ Mason Cooley
- “Aphorisms have never seduced anybody, but they have fooled some into considering themselves worldly-wise.” ~ Mason Cooley
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“Age certainly hadn’t conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russian writers have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.” ~ Haruki Murakami
- “All of us encounter, at least once in our life, some individual who utters words that make us think forever. There are men whose phrases are oracles; who condense in one sentence the secrets of life; who blurt out an aphorism that forms a character or illustrates an existence.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli
- “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.” ~ Zadie Smith
- “Aphorisms are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling.” ~ William Rounseville Alger
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“‘Character,” says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms – character is destiny’.” ~ George Eliot
- “I do not know to whom the aphorism ‘There are no sound studies, only ones that haven’t been busted yet’ belongs, but it has measure of truth in it.” ~ Mark Dvoretsky
- “I wrote my first two long novels and an anthology of short narratives, when I was a manager of my own jazz bar. There was not enough time to write and I didn’t know how to write novels. Therefore, I made written collages of aphorisms and rags.” ~ Haruki Murakami
- “Alan Kay’s famous aphorism is that perspective is worth 80 IQ points. An innovative insight is not the product of an individual’s brilliance. It’s not as if innovators’ heads are wired in different ways. Innovation typically comes from looking at the world through a slightly different lens.” ~ Gary Hamel
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“An aphorism is the last link in a long chain of thought.” ~ Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
- “One can never be too rich or too thin’ is an aphorism attributed to the Duchess of Windsor. Being both rich and thin is a difficult enterprise, indeed almost unprecedented as an ideal. Into the paradoxical gap between the capacity to spend money and the need to eat less steps a brilliant solution: ‘light’ food. In buying ‘light’ food we can pay more for what costs less to produce in the first place.” ~ Margaret Visser
- “Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.” ~ Northrop Frye
- “An aphorism is a generalization, therefore not modern.” ~ John Fowles
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“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse
- “We have the highest authority for believing that the meek shall inherit the earth; though I have never found any particular corroboration of this aphorism in the records of Somerset House.” ~ F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead
- “Belief in form, but disbelief in content – that’s what makes an aphorism charming.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “What are the precise characteristics of an epigram it is not easy to define. It differs from a joke, in the fact that the wit of the latter dies in the words, and cannot therefore be conveyed in another language; while an epigram is a wit of ideas, and hence, is translatable. Like aphorisms, songs and sonnets, it is occupied with some single point, small and manageable; but whilst a song conveys a sentiment, a sonnet a poetical, and an aphorism a moral reflection, an epigram expresses a contrast.” ~ William Matthews
- “Aphorisms may equivocate, but they must not wobble.” ~ Mason Cooley
