"Epigram" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... le Russe—et cetera. You are mighty fond, J.B., Of quoting that stale epigram. You fancy it riles me. Not a bit of it, my Briton; Tartars have a thickish skin, And your foe and I are neighbours, nay a distant ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 17, 1891 • Various
... the battle of Cynos Cephalas (the Dog-heads), was the following epigram, composed by Alcaeus in mockery of Philip, exaggerating the number of ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... with you," said Mr. Goodwood with gloomy plainness and no appearance of trying to make an epigram. "What has he ever done?" ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... there was a kicking on the studio door. "Is the Nilghai with you still?" said a voice from within. "Then tell him he might have condensed the whole of his lumbering nonsense into an epigram: 'Only the free are bond, and only the bond are free.' Tell him he's an idiot, Torp, and tell him ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... neglect such a capital chance of advancement as the one now offered to him. The two "roues" gave him, in fine satirical style, the history of Madame Felix de Vandenesse; they drove the scalpel of epigram and the sharp points of much good wit into that innocent girlhood and happy marriage. Blondet congratulated Raoul on encountering a woman guilty of nothing worse so far than horrible drawings in ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... resumed his magazine with the pleased air of a man who has delivered himself of a brilliant epigram; it showed ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... last Cockney epigram clings to my memory. For as I was walking a little while ago round a corner near Victoria I realized for the first time that a familiar lamp-post was painted all over with a bright vermilion just as if it ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... should adopt. Clerk's suggestion was "Lord Preserve Us." The legal acquirements of James Wolfe Murray were not held in high esteem by his brethren of the Bar, and when he became a judge with the title of Lord Cringletie, Clerk wrote the following clever epigram: ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... relations. They marry, of course, they produce children, they propagate the race; but, I would venture to say, they do not love, as Europeans have loved; they do not exploit the emotion, analyse and enjoy it, still less express it in manners, in gesture, in epigram, in verse. And hence the kind of shudder produced in a cultivated European by the treatment of emotion in American fiction. The authors are trying to express something they have never experienced, and to graft the European tradition on to a civilization which has none of the elements ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... Luttridge thought the panniers would carry the election; and forthwith she sent off an express for a pair of panniers twice as large as ours. I took out my pencil, and drew a caricature of the ass and her panniers; wrote an epigram at the bottom of it; and the epigram and the caricature were soon in the hands of half ——shire. The verses were as bad as impromptus usually are, and the drawing was not much better than the writing; but the good-will of the critics supplied all my deficiencies; and never ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... are that. I was very impertinent to you at dinner in trying to catch you with Martial his epigram, though I shall not offend again. But his humour may be generally tranquil in spite of it. Well, if that is so, I do not see why you need trouble about the Holy Maid. He would likely have been a monk without ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... same time it helps to dissipate one ridiculous popular fallacy about Meredith. Meredith, like most all the wits, has been accused of straining after image and epigram. Wit acts as an irritant on many people. They forget the admirable saying of Coleridge: "Exclusive of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms; and the greatest of men is but an aphorism." They might ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... 1806, but he lived long enough to hear the splendid eloquence of Grattan, rich in imagination, metaphor, and epigram; and to open the doors of the official hierarchy to George Canning. Trained by Pitt, and in many gifts and graces his superior, Canning first displayed his full greatness after the death of his illustrious master. For twenty years he was the most accomplished ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... George Sand that nothing is such a restorative as rhetoric, or the claim advanced by a patriot that Shakespeare was undoubtedly a Scotchman, on the ground that his talents would justify the supposition. The humour of George Sand's epigram depends upon the perception that rhetoric, which ought to be based upon a profound conviction, an overwhelming passion, an intense enthusiasm, is often little more than the abandonment of a personality ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... has not been sufficiently present to the mind of critics who have called for plain, familiar, and concrete diction, as if that alone could claim to be simple; who have demanded a style unadorned by the artifices of involution, cadence, imagery, and epigram, as if Simplicity were incompatible with these; and have praised meagreness, mistaking it for Simplicity. Saxon words are words which in their homeliness have deep-seated power, and in some places they are the simplest because the most powerful words we can employ; ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... writing epigrams was preserved until a very late period. Seneca, Pliny the younger, Hadrian, and many others, were fond of composing them; and in modern times the epigram has been a favorite kind of poetry with most ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... some regard each facet as an independent eye, in which case many insects realise the epigram ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... by advancing, as far as she could do so, views diametrically opposed to her own. So witty and so gracious was she, so much herself with this stranger, with whom she felt completely at ease, because she felt sure that they should never meet again, that, after some delicious epigram of hers, Gaston ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... difficult expressions are more rarely achieved and these are called works of art. The limits of the expressions and intuitions that are called art, as opposed to those that are vulgarly called not-art, are empirical and impossible to define. If an epigram be art, why not a single word? If a story; why not the occasional note of the journalist? If a landscape, why not a topographical sketch? The teacher of philosophy in Moliere's comedy was right: "whenever we speak we create prose." But there will always be scholars like Monsieur ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... all so abnormally normal," retorted Peter—which impressed me as being both clever and true. And when Lady Allie, worrying over that epigram, became as self-immured as a Belgian milk-dog, Peter cocked an eye at me as a robin cocks an eye at a fish-worm, and I had the audacity to murmur across the table at him, "Lady Barbarina." Whereupon he said back, without ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... have strayed and gazed alone. What flippant Frenchman [3] was it who said, in allusion to the well known work of Zimmermann, that "la solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut quelqu'un pour vous dire que la solitude est une belle chose"? The epigram cannot be gainsaid; but the necessity is a ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... but I assure you I will make up terribly. I am recruiting again; I believe our regiment won't go abroad this summer. I was glad to see by the London newspapers, that Mr. Robert Dodsley had at last published your Cub: Mr. H—— showed me a very severe Epigram that somebody in London had written upon it. You know it is natural to take a lick at a Cub. Pray come to us. I cannot all at once come into the way of letter-writing again, so ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... impressions so masterfully that the reader often has the feeling of a physical experience; and it is but natural that up to his thirty-fifth year, before he discovered his literary talent, he had dreamed of being a landscape painter. Hebbel's epigram, "Know ye why ye are such past masters in painting beetles and buttercups? 'Tis because ye know not man; 'tis because ye see not the stars," utterly fails to do justice to Stifter's poetic individuality. But in avoiding the great tempests ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... been defended. I own to having been, both at the time and since, one of its most decided and irreconcilable assailants. Nor do I think that Mr Arnold would have much relished the apology made, I think, by Mr Leslie Stephen since his death, that its critics "mistake an epigram for a philosophical definition." In the first place, the epigrammatic quality is not clearly apparent; and in the second place, an epigram would in the particular place have been anything but appropriate, while a philosophical definition ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... candidates are arranged according to their places in the school, and the lowest two boys first enter the arena. The lower of these two is the challenger. He calls upon his adversary to translate an epigram, to parse it, or to answer any grammatical question connected with the subject. Demand after demand is made, until there is an error. The Master is appealed to, and answers, "It was a mistake." Then the challenger and the challenged change places, and the latter, with fierce eagerness, ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... somnambulist will out. He decries the carnal combat of the prize-ring, and compels the red animal to spiritual combat. The poisoned lie, the nasty, gossiping tongue, the brutality of the unkind epigram, the business and social nastiness and treachery of to-day—these are the thrusts and scratches of the red animal when the somnambulist is in charge. They are not the upper cuts and short arm jabs and jolts and slugging blows of the spirit. They are the foul blows ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... surrounded by a coral wall, commanded by a gate that bears a Latin epigram. The graves, as indicated by the mounds of dirt, are never very deep, and while a few are guarded by a wooden cross, forlornly decorated by a withered bunch of flowers, most of the graves receive no care at all. There may be ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... must have been of the very first order in a witty age. Walpole is full of him. Walpole himself, a wit, and infinitely jealous of every rival in every thing on which he fastened his fame, from a picture gallery down to a snuff-box, or from a history down to an epigram, bows down to him with almost Persian idolatry. His letters are alive with George Selwyn. The bons-mots which Selwyn carelessly dropped in his morning wall through St James's Street, are carefully picked up by Walpole, and planted in his correspondence, like exotics in a greenhouse. The careless ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... stand in the way of the talents with which Providence has blest me; to scorn the little delicacies of art, which I execute so well, would, in my opinion, be as absurd as for an epic poet to disdain the composition of a perfect epigram, or a consummate musician, the melody ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and devices Jack Dobson and I were so fond of. And if I did not soon learn to do something well, even were it only how to farm my five hundred acres to a profit, Kate's cooking would really require the miraculous aid suggested in her unintentional and, to me, biting epigram. I put the book down, and gave over the hunt for my Virgil. It would probably be useless in any case, since Kate had a cunning all her own, and had surely bestowed it far beyond any searching of mine. I contented myself with a fair reprisal, stowing a stray ribbon of hers in my breeches' pocket, ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... power of sympathy. This is especially true of eyes. Wyttenbach compares the Epigram in the Anthology, i. 46. 9. [Greek: Kai gar dexion omma kakoumenon ommati laio ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... had also produced a keener or more active turn of mind, so that it was necessary not only to be short, but also pithy. It was not necessary to be humorous, but it was essential to be concise and interesting, and thus Martial gave to the epigram that character for point which ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... kicking on the studio door. 'Is the Nilghai with you still?' said a voice from within. 'Then tell him he might have condensed the whole of his lumbering nonsense into an epigram: "Only the free are bond, and only the bond are free." Tell him he's an idiot, Torp, ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... attention was turned seriously to Eastern literature was in 1791, when, through Herder's efforts, he made the acquaintance of Kalidasa's dramatic masterpiece Sakuntala, which inspired the well known epigram "Willst du die Bluete des fruehen," etc., an extravagant eulogy rather than an appreciative criticism. That the impression was not merely momentary is proved by the fact that five years later the poet took the inspiration for his Faust prologue ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... criticism of them, "De l'esprit, encore de l'esprit, et toujours de l'esprit—trop d'esprit!" [10] No doubt, La Rochefoucauld has done his own reputation wrong by the bluster of his scepticism and also by the fact that he sometimes wraps his thoughts up in such a blaze of epigram that we are disconcerted to find, when we analyze them, that they are commonplaces. Contemporaries seemed to have smiled at the excessive subtlety into which their long conversations led Mme de La Fayette and her sublime ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... and the din and smithery of school-learning. Does he know anything more of poetry? He knows the number of feet in a verse, and of acts in a play; but of the soul or spirit he knows nothing. He can turn a Greek ode into English, or a Latin epigram into Greek verse; but whether either is worth the trouble he leaves to the critics. Does he understand 'the act and practique part of life' better than 'the theorique'? No. He knows no liberal or mechanic art, no trade or occupation, no game of skill or chance. Learning ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... subsequently cut by Mr. Croker on the back of a chair which the poet occupied during this visit. It produced the following epigram by the ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... at first sight it presents a sad scene of confusion. The wrong people often seem to be punished; blessings, such as those heaped upon the head of the patriarch Job, do not seem to be accumulated upon the righteous. In fact, the old epigram that prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament, adversity the blessing of the New, seems frequently justified. But, after all, the only soul-history that one knows well enough to say whether or not the experience of life is adapted to the qualities of the particular soul, is ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... us the whole matter in a nutshell, in the following quaint epigram, entitled "A Tobacconist," taken from an ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... This epigram was read by all Florence. A few days afterwards Pope Julius II. died. The Cardinal de' Medici went to Rome, and was elected Pope against the expectation of everybody. He reigned as Leo X, that generous and great soul. My father sent him his four ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... of Aberdeen has presented Dr Johnson with the freedom of that place, for he has sold his freedom on this side of the Tweed for a pension.' The definition of oats in the Dictionary is brought up against its author, and Bozzy is also attacked in a doggerel epigram on his Corsican Tour and his system of spelling. But the doctor easily maintained his conversational supremacy over his academic hosts, who 'started not a single mawkin ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... Constantinople against Russia, afterwards stultified by the Berlin Congress, which he himself attended; the annexation of Cyprus; the Afghan and Zulu wars, were its salient features. Defeated at the polls in 1880 he resigned, and died next year. A master of epigram and a brilliant debater, he really led his party. He was the opposite in all respects of his protagonist, Mr. Gladstone. Lacking in zeal, he was yet loyal to England, and a warm personal friend ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... correspondent "Roterodamus" (pp. 27, 28) asks, I hope, for the author of the epigram which he quotes, with a view to a life of his great townsman, Erasmus. Such a book, written by some competent hand, and in an enlarged and liberal spirit, would be a noble addition to the literature of Europe. There is no civilised country ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 4, Saturday, November 24, 1849 • Various
... quip, quirk, crank, quiddity, concetto[obs3], plaisanterie[Fr], brilliant idea; merry thought, bright thought, happy thought; sally; flash of wit, flash of merriment; scintillation; mot[Fr], mot pour rire [French]; witticism, smart saying, bon-mot,jeu d'esprit[Fr],epigram; jest book; dry joke, quodlibet, cream of the jest. word-play, jeu de mots[Fr]; play of words, play upon words; pun, punning; double entente, double entendre &c. (ambiguity) 520[Fr]; quibble, verbal quibble; conundrum &c. (riddle) 533; anagram, acrostic, double acrostic, trifling, idle conceit, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... In this representative of his craft Eugene discovered a man who understood that his was a sort of paternal function for young men at their entrance into life, who regarded himself as a stepping-stone between a young man's present and future. And Rastignac in gratitude made the man's fortune by an epigram of a kind in which he excelled at a later period ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... letter. [Footnote: Announcing his engagement to Miss Broadhurst. It was singular that this was the name of the heroine in Miss Edgeworth's Absentee, who selected from her lovers the one who united worth and wit, in reminiscence of an epigram of ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... clear, but the epigram is not. He appears to mean the King of Egypt when speaking of his gods, as also a few ...
— Egyptian Literature
... London, where he speedily gathered a large and influential congregation, as much by the somewhat excessive fervour of his piety as by the vivacious illustrations which he frequently employed in his sermons. He was a master of epigram, and theologically inclined to Calvinism. The Sacheverell mob gutted his chapel in 1710, but the government repaired the building. Besides preaching, he gave instruction to private pupils, of whom ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the walls of the aisles are covered with memorials of local celebrities; amongst them there is a tablet to Nash (S. wall near S. transept). The tomb of Lady Waller in S. transept, and Garrick's epitaph on Quin (N. aisle of choir) should perhaps also be noticed. As Dr Harington's sprightly epigram suggests, this portentous display of mortality is not an inspiring study for visitors who come to Bath to ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... a maid, That was most Fair; to him she said, Thy Ink, my Papper, make me guess, Our Nuptial Bed will make a Press, And to our Sports, if any came They'll read a Wanton Epigram, ...
— The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony: Responses From Women • Various
... help me.' I naturally asked her what I was to talk about, and she promptly replied 'Nothing. Study the American girl, they have the most brilliant way of jabbering meaningless recitativos of any tribe on the face of the earth. Every sentence is an epigram with the point left out. They are like the effervescent part of a bottle of soda-water.' This was while we were still in Wales, and she sent for six books by two of those American novelists who are supposed to be the expounders-in-chief of the American girl at home and abroad, ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... learning without virtue is a pearl on a dunghill. He spends the whole day in settling whether Homer expressed himself correctly or not in such and such a line of the Iliad, whether Martial was indecent or not in such and such an epigram, whether such and such lines of Virgil are to be understood in this way or in that; in short, all his talk is of the works of these poets, and those of Horace, Perseus, Juvenal, and Tibullus; for of the ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Philanthropy: to J. D. Llewellyn, Esq., Penllergare Disraeli Down in the Dark: the Ferndale Explosion DAISY MAY:—Part the First Part the Second Part the Third Lines, accompanying a Purse Forsaken Christmas is Coming Heart Links The Oak to the Ivy Epigram on a Welshwoman's Hat Shadows in the Fire The Belfry Old Beautiful Barbara Song of the Silken Shroud A University for Wales Griefs Untold I Will Dawn and Death Castles in the Air The Withered Rose Wrecks of Life Eleanor New Year's ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... as if there were something reprehensible in an artist's pleasing the public. This notion might seem to have some basis in view of the taste that is affected to-day—a predilection for all that is shocking and displeasing in all the arts, including poetry. Sorcieres's epigram—the ugly is beautiful and the beautiful ugly—has become a programme. People are no longer content with merely admiring atrocities, they even speak with contempt of beauties hallowed by time ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... is given to the company by the "teacher" and those joining in the game are each to define the subject in as terse a manner as possible, in epigram or verse, written on a slip of paper. The cards are then signed, turned in and the "teacher" reads the definitions. Then the company are to decide which one of the definitions has the greatest merit. For instance, the word ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... the way along With many a neat little epigram, While dear Pease-blossom before him swam On a billow of lovely moonlit song, Telling us why they had left their home In Sherwood, and had hither come To dwell in this magical scented clime, This dim old Forest ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... a game be played for the sake of pelf Where a button goes, 'twere an epigram To offer the ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... understand the obscure lines of the original, Cellini wanted to kill two birds with one stone by this epigram—both Bernardone and his son Baccio. But by Buaccio he generally ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... with short-lived splendour, Flashed the ready epigram, Thoughts we uttered, soft and tender, Ending in a smothered "——"; All the truths and lies of ages Compassed we in one short breath, Flouted whims of priests and sages, Lightly ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... in scolding his nurse, dies with a magnificent apothegm on his lips, manufactured by a reporter. Addison gets up a tableau and utters an admirable sentiment,—or somebody makes the posthumous dying epigram for him. The incoherent babble of green fields is translated into the language of stately sentiment. One would think, all that dying men had to do was to say the prettiest thing they could,—to make their rhetorical point,—and then bow themselves politely ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... an Age of Prizes that it is destined to be chiefly remembered. The humble but frantic solver of Acrostics has had his turn, the correct expounder of the law of Hard Cases has by this time established a complete code of etiquette; the doll-dresser, the epigram-maker, the teller of witty stories, the calculator who can discover by an instinct the number of letters in a given page of print, all have displayed their ingenuity, and have been magnificently rewarded by prizes varying in value from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 4, 1890 • Various
... that the Senator stands for in modern life has a corresponding typical fact in modern literature. The typical fact in modern literature is the epigram, the senatorial sentence, the sentence that immeasurably represents what it does not say. The difference between democracy in Washington and democracy in Athens may be said to be that in Washington we have ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... This accords with the taste of present-day readers, many of whom take up a book only for the momentary amusement that it gives them, and are well content with interminable dialogues that do little more than echo, with a certain spice of epigram and smart repartee, the commonplaces interchanged among clever people at a country house or in a London drawing-room. Nevertheless, we believe that Anglo-Indian fiction is seen at its best in the novel of action, since war and love-making must still, as formerly, rule the whole kingdom of romance; ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... come closer to humanity through the medium of a form of fiction, is to be detected an added interest in personality for its own sake. During the eighteenth century, commonly described as the Teacup Times, an age of powder and patches, of etiquette, epigram and surface polish, there developed a keener sense of the value of the individual, of the sanctity of the ego, a faint prelude to the note that was to become so resonant in the nineteenth century, sounding through ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... dazzling and painful: it bewilders with far-fetched and witty conceits: varied but full of art, there is little of nature or real passion to be found even in his amatory verses. He suited the taste of a court which preferred an epigram to a proverb, and a repartee to an apothegm; and, as a consequence, with the growth of a better culture and a better taste, he has steadily declined in favor, so that at the present day he is scarcely read at all. Two authoritative opinions mark the history of this decline: Milton, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... it for an epigram? Well, it will pass. True, there's the hardship of his position. There's nothing for him to do but to write, yet he is handicapped by his money. I should have done something worth the doing, if I had ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... conclusions when one's talk is thus negligently agreed to: either the speaker is confining herself entirely to incontradictable platitudes, or the listener has no mind of her own; and in either case silence were golden. In this connection it were well to recall the really brilliant epigram of the Abbe de Saint-Real, that 'On s'ennuie presque toujours avec ceux que l'on ennuie.' For not even a lover can fail to be bored at last by the constant lassitude of assent expressing itself in twin sentiments to his ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... man would act in an ungentlemanly way," said the curate, and then smiled, for he thought he had unconsciously made an epigram. ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... tail of Lebrun's epigram struck home. Sieyes' acceptance of Crosne was, in fact, his acceptance of notice to quit public affairs, in which he had always moved with philosophic disdain. He lived on to the year 1836 in dignified ease, surveying with Olympian calm the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... the minister turned to America, where it was a notorious fact that there were revenue laws that had not been enforced these many years. Mr. Grenville, we may suppose, since it was charged against him in a famous epigram, read the American dispatches with considerable care, so that it is quite possible he may have chanced to see and to shake his head over the sworn statement of Mr. Sampson Toovey, a statement which throws much light upon colonial liberties and the practices of English ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... the temporalities of Crossraguel Abbey, and by the favour of Murray, Principal of St. Leonard's College in St. Andrew's. Perhaps he fancied at times that "to-morrow was to be as to-day, and much more abundant;" that thenceforth he might read his folio, and write his epigram, and joke his joke, as a lazy comfortable pluralist, taking his morning stroll out to the corner where poor Wishart had been burned, above the blue sea and the yellow sands, and looking up to the castle tower from whence his ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... Berry, Lady Davy; the three poets, Rogers, William Spencer, and Campbell; Sir James Macintosh, and Lord Dudley. Rogers, who was a bitter satirist and hated Lord Dudley, had written the following, epigram:— ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... prophetic epigrams on the name of Alexander, which for the second time seemed to promise the Romans the empire of the world; and the same evening, in the midst of brilliant illuminations and bonfires, which seemed to turn the town into a lake of flame, the following epigram was read, amid the acclamation of ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... an epic in an epigram—"She seen her duty and she done it!" but the space and time covered are generally as far beyond our plans as the estimates of an amateur mountain ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... the truth about mystical dogmas and the truth about Irish bulls; it is also the truth about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw. Each of them is an argument impatiently shortened into an epigram. Each of them represents a truth hammered and hardened, with an almost disdainful violence until it is compressed into a small space, until it is made brief and almost incomprehensible. The case of that curt remark about Ireland and Yorkshire is a very typical ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... about Halifax from his own elaborate study of Charles II. It is a prolonged analysis by a man of clear vision, and perfect balance of judgement, and no prepossessions; who was, moreover, master of the easy pellucid style that tends to maxim and epigram. A more impartial and convincing estimate of any king need never be expected. In method and purpose, it stands by itself. It is indeed not so much a character in the accepted sense of the word as a scientific investigation of a personality. ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... got through somehow; and on Sundays he sallies forth for rural air with a little knot of friends, and the talk is of art, and letters, and the world. So quick and keen a nature as his had immense buoyancy in it. Nay, for the very dun young Douglas had an epigram,—as bright, but not as welcome, as a sovereign. A saying of those early days has found its way into a comedy,—but not the less belongs to his authentic biography. A threatening attorney shakes his fist at the villakin where at the window the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... novelists, it is doubtful if many American readers knew that there were Dutch novelists. His 'God's Fool' and 'Joost Avelingh' made for him an American reputation. To our mind this just published work of his is his best.... He is a master of epigram, an artist in description, a prophet ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... This subject is indeed so copiously handled by Hegesias, the Cyrenaic philosopher, that he is said to have been forbid by Ptolemy from delivering his lectures in the schools, because some who heard him made away with themselves. There is too, an epigram of Callimachus,(69) on Cleombrotus of Ambracia; who, without any misfortune having befallen him, as he says, threw himself from a wall into the sea, after he had read a boot of Plato's. The book I mentioned of that Hegesias, is called {GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI}{GREEK ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... Valliere, did Louis relent; his animosity, because of some witticism of mine on the subject of his hysterical mistress, has pursued me throughout life; not only me, but every member of my family. For a mere epigram I was banished from Paris, and your father stripped of a lucrative and honorable office. We managed after a time to return to court, but my enemies were more powerful than I. Through the jealousy of the Marquise de Montespan I was a second time banished; but before we ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... it was very simply, in broken sentences, as children speak. The poetry of their relation to one another and the scene about them were too full of meaning, too lovely, to call for polish of rhetoric, or pointing by epigram. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... French poetry they would substitute reproductions or re-creations of classical forms. Rondeaux, ballades, virelais, chants royaux, chansons are to be cast aside as epiceries; and their place is to be taken by odes like those of Pindar or of Horace, by the elegy, satire, epigram, epic, or by newer forms justified by the practice of Italian masters. Rich but not over-curious rhymes are to be cultivated, with in general the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes; the caesura is to fall in ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... not read in England. And in the October Cornhill is an Article upon him (I hope not by Leslie Stephen), so ignorant and self-sufficient that I am more wroth than ever. The old Story of 'Pope in worsted stockings'—why I could cite whole Paragraphs of as fine texture as Moliere—incapable of Epigram, the Jackanapes says of 'our excellent Crabbe'—why I could find fifty of the very best Epigrams in five minutes. But now do you care for him? 'Honour bright?' as Sheridan used to say. I don't think I ever knew a Woman who did like C., except my Mother. What makes People (this ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... from one end of the stage to the other; he would crouch and bend as if he were going to spring upon the audience, a long, skinny finger would be shaken before their faces, or pointed as if to drive his words into their hearts. His speech was a torrent of epigram, sarcasm, invective. He was bitter; if you knew nothing about the man or his cause, you would find this repellent and shocking. You had to know what his life had been—an unceasing conflict with oppression; he had got his Socialist education in jail, where ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... (Vol. i., p. 172.).—I had no means (for reasons I need not now specify) of referring to my 1st Vol. of "N. & Q." until yesterday, for the pretty epigram given in an English dress by RUFUS and as the writer in the Athenaeum, whose communication you quote on the same subject (Vol. i., p. 308.), observes "that the translator has taken some liberties with his text," I make no apology for sending you a much closer rendering, which ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 180, April 9, 1853 • Various
... well known epigram is the original of one equally famous in English, that written by Tom Brown on Dr. John Fell, ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... combat, as the Gauls did their adversaries, according to Diodorus Siculus; and as Francis I. will do later when at feud with Charles V. He was to die in an expedition undertaken out of revenge for an epigram of the king of France, and to make ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... literature. Spencer, the poet, belonged to it, and to one of its members he has dedicated his "Tears of the Muses." It was for Alice Spencer that Milton is said to have written his "Arcades," and Sir John Harrington has celebrated her memory by an epigram. The Sacharissa of Waller was the Lady Dorothy Sidney, wife of the first Earl of Sunderland, the third Lord Spencer, who perished fighting for King Charles I. at Newbury. I do not dwell on the other associations of a ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... one, which I think they call his parlour, is a very antique cupboard; where, it is supposed, he deposited some precious part of his literary treasure. The ceiling is painted in a grotesque manner. A niche in the wall contains the skeleton of his favourite cat, with a Latin epigram beneath, of Petrarch's composition. It is good enough to deserve being copied; but the lateness of the hour did not allow me time. A little room, beyond this, is said to have been his study: the walls of it, from ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... intellectual emotions when I saw that answer to my question; the question of why the garden did not belong to the gardener. No better epigram could be put in reply than simply putting the Spade Guinea beside the Spade. This was the only underground seed that I could understand. Only by having a little more of that dull, battered yellow substance could I manage to be idle ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... his residence in France as embassador of the United Colonies, belong to the political history of the country; to the history of American science belong his celebrated experiments in electricity; and his benefits to mankind in both of these departments were aptly summed up in the famous epigram of the French ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... indicate that he just fell below the first rank in each subject. Ptolemy Euergetes appointed him to be tutor to his son (Philopator), and he became librarian at Alexandria; he recognized his obligation to Ptolemy by erecting a column with a graceful epigram. In this epigram he referred to the earlier solutions of the problem of duplicating the cube or finding the two mean proportionals, and advocated his own in preference, because it would give any number of means; on the column was fixed a ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... is that a few are born booted and spurred to ride, and that the many are born saddled and bridled to be ridden. The republican theory is that "Everybody is cleverer than anybody," to quote the epigram attributed to Talleyrand; and that government, in Lincoln's phrase, should be "of the people, by the people, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... fabric was reared,—all these qualities of the orator demand and receive our sincere applause. In an age when indolence or the study of French models has reduced our sentences to the economic curtness of telegraphic despatches, to the dimension of the epigram without its point, Mr. Choate is one of the few whose paragraphs echo with the long-resounding pace of Dryden's coursers, and who can drive a predicate and six without ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... in a hotel in Manchester, where he had served a friend of mine, to whom he now expressed his opinion on the folly of the war, and the criminality of his war lords, and things in general. Among these last he uttered an epigram which I remember for its brutal simplicity. It was when a staff-officer of ours, rather the worse for wine, had been making a scene with the head waiter, bullying him in a ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... thousand." The essential difference between the German soldiers and our own is in the officering and training, and it is admirably expressed by Private Burrell, Northumberland Fusiliers. "We are led; they are driven,"[F] is Burrell's epigram. ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... maintain a dignified indifference as he answers the rather flippant curiosity of the local press interviewer. Uncle Piper, on the other hand, is introduced, as all of Tasma's characters are, in sundry solid-looking pages of direct narrative. It is true that their humour and epigram make bright reading, but they are necessarily without the power of pithy dialogue to create a vivid ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... monument, as we learn from Thucydides, Pausanias, regent of Sparta, inscribed an arrogant distich, in which he commemorates the victory in his own name as general in chief, hardly mentioning the allied forces who gained it. This epigram was subsequently erased by the Lacedaemonians, who substituted it for an inscription enumerating the various Hellenic states who had taken a part in repulsing the Persian invaders. The inscription contains exactly what the statements of Thucydides ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... obtained when an infantry regiment mutinied and shot its officers rather than eat the nauseous mess; fortunately, Lord Birrell of Blatherstone, who was War Minister at the moment, saved the situation by his happy epigram, that "Discipline to be effective ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... England should expect to find rather in New Orleans. The academic aristocracy of Boston, which Oliver Wendell Holmes called the Brahmins, is still a reality though it was always a minority and is now a very small minority. An epigram, invented by Yale at the expense of Harvard, describes it as ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... our kin and kind is made pleasanter by our daily platitudes. Who is more tedious than the man incessantly struggling to avoid the banal? Nature rules that such a one will produce nothing better than epigram and paradox, saying old, old things in a new way, or merely shifting object for subject—and his wife's face, when he shines for a circle, is worth a glance. With no further apology, I declare that I am a person who has felt few positive likes or dislikes for people ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... song neither, it's a sort of an epigram, or rather an epigrammatic sonnet; I don't know what to call it, but it's satire. ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... a day or two there came a letter-unusually long for Gaston— to Mrs. Gasgoyne herself. It was simple, descriptive, with a dash of epigram. It acknowledged that he had felt the curb, and wanted a touch of the unconventional. It spoke of Ian Belward in a dry phrase, and it asked for the date of the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... an epigram in Martial, and one of the very good ones—for he has of all sorts—where he pleasantly tells the story of Caelius, who, to avoid making his court to some great men of Rome, to wait their rising, and to attend them abroad, pretended to have the gout; and the better to colour this anointed his ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Lloyd George, his supplanter, he has lost the earnestness which brought him to the seats of power. A domestic circle, brilliant with the modern spirit and much occupied in sharpening the wits with epigram and audacity, has proved too much for his original stoicism. He has found recreation in the modern spirit. After the day's work there has been nothing so diverting for him as the society of young people; chatter rather ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... nurses can leave their sex outside their profession," was a pet epigram of Ledyard's, "they ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... very good at an epigram," said the other, smiling. "We are Frenchmen; the affair can ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... what, prince; a college of witcrackers cannout flout me out of my humour. Dost thou think I care for a satire or an epigram? No; if man will be beaten with brains, a' shall wear nothing handsome about him. In brief, since I do purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it; and therefore never flout at me for what I have said against it, for man is a giddy thing, and this is my ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... kaleidoscope of fancy and epigram gives him some kinship with the present day, he was essentially of an earlier type: he was the last of the prophets. With him vanishes the secret of that early Victorian simplicity which gave a man the courage to mount ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... heart." Now the heart of Lord Bacon was not as high as his intellect; no one could for a moment imagine his facing martyrdom. He had none of the splendid audacity, the undaunted courage, the unshakable fortitude, of his loftier contemporary, Giordano Bruno. So much truth is there in Pope's epigram, that his lordship was capable at times of grovelling; witness his fulsome, though magnificent, dedication of the Advancement of Learning to King James—the British Solomon, as his flatterers called him, to the amusement of the great ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... as his own." Here it is well to note that St. Thomas in this single sentence teaches that private property, or the individual occupation of actual land or capital or instruments of wealth, is not contrary to the moral law. Consequently he would repudiate the famous epigram, "La Propriete c'est le vol." Man may hold and dispose of what belongs to him, may have private property, and in no way offend against the principles of ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... Elie de Beaumont and of Flourens—the former of whom is said to have "damned himself to everlasting fame" by inventing the nickname of "la science moussante" for Evolutionism (One is reminded of the effect of another small academic epigram. The so-called vertebral theory of the skull is said to have been nipped in the bud in France by the whisper of an academician to his neighbour, that, in that case, one's head was a "vertebre pensante."),—to say nothing of the ill-will of other powerful members of the Institut, produced ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... acquainted with the customs of both these seats of learning, perhaps some may be good enough to afford information. Owen was at Oxford not many years after Whitgift had been Master of Trinity at Cambridge, if (as Wood states) he took his bachelor's degree in 1590. The epigram is ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.02.23 • Various |
