"Apothegm" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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, in his own ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... same Air that the Dog breath'd out. It would have been much more to Alexander's, Glory, if he had drank with the Dogs. For there is nothing worse for a King, who has the Care of so many thousand Persons, than Drunkenness. But the Apothegm that Romulus very wittily made Use of, shews plainly that he was no Wine-Drinker. For when a certain Person, taking Notice of his abstaining from Wine, said to him, that Wine would be very cheap, if all Men drank as he did; nay, says he, in my Opinion it would ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... lay in the sleep of death. His wish was fulfilled—the body rested, while the spirit went unhindered on its pilgrimage. "Let no one deem himself happy before his end," were the words of Solon; and here was a new and brilliant proof of the wisdom of the old apothegm. ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... religion, the principles of physical religion are few and easy to be understood. An old medical apothegm personifies the hygienic forces as the Doctors Air, Diet, Exercise, and Quiet: and these four will be found, on reflection, to cover the whole ground of what is required to preserve human health. A human being whose lungs have always been nourished by pure air, whose stomach has been fed only ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of the line may have himself intended by his apothegm. To become acquainted with the peculiarities of plants or birds is to increase one's knowledge of beings ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... direction; that the sentiment against concentrating research will prove to operate too strongly. There is a feeling that it is rather better to leave every investigator where he chances to be at the moment, a feeling which sometimes finds expression in the apothegm that we cannot transplant a genius. That such a proposition should find acceptance affords a striking example of the readiness of men to accept a euphonious phrase without inquiring whether the facts support the doctrine which it enunciates. The fact is ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... is, 'Dem as libs longest will see most!'" said Wool, shaking his white head. After which undeniable apothegm the conversation came to ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... to be wisely managed. English experience will tell you, more to the purpose, that 'perseverance is power;' for with it, all things can be done, without it nothing. I remember, in the history of Tamerlane, an incident which, to me, has always had the force of an apothegm. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... to Zenobia's concluding apothegm. In truth, I admired her fidelity. It gave me a new sense of Hollingsworth's native power, to discover that his influence was no less potent with this beautiful woman here, in the midst of artificial life, than it had been at the foot of the gray rock, and among the wild birch-trees ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... conclusion to which so many thinkers in all ages and of all races have been driven, that underlying all phenomena is one primal and adequate Cause, the Essence of all Existence. This conclusion he expressed in a philosophic apothegm which was preserved by ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... of their one or two scholars to consult their convenience, and then come home to a table that would make any kind soul weep; but as to estimating the velocity of bills-payable in their orbits, such trained sagacity was not theirs. Their economy knew how to avoid what the Creole-African apothegm calls commerce Man Lizon—qui assete pou' trois picaillons et vend' pou' ein escalin (bought for three picayunes and sold for two); but it was an economy that made their very hound a Spartan; for, had that ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable |
