"Apophthegm" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... looked up from his notebook. "That last one," he said, "is particularly subtle and beautiful, don't you think? Without Inspiration I could never have hit on that." He re-read the apophthegm with a slower and more solemn utterance. "Straight from the Infinite," he commented reflectively, then addressed himself ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... fortitude can never cut a way Between the Austrian muskets, out of thrall:" I tell you rather that, whoever may Discern true ends here, shall grow pure enough To love them, brave enough to strive for them, And strong to reach them though the roads be rough: That having learnt—by no mere apophthegm— Not just the draping of a graceful stuff About a statue, broidered at the hem,— Not just the trilling on an opera-stage Of "liberta" to bravos—(a fair word, Yet too allied to inarticulate rage And breathless sobs, for singing, though the chord Were deeper ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... origin, that these events must be judged, or that they come to pass. But surely by the Spirit of God. "There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth it understanding." Here Job gives us the key to unlock the mysteries of the crownless king and his success. The apothegm of Bonaparte is as false as he was unsuccessful—namely, that Providence is always on the side of the strongest battalions. In Israel, in time of old, this was seldom true. In fact, it was not true in the experience and campaigns of Bonaparte. The logic of such a faith has been the ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... in literature. We find it among the wisdom of the ancients, and it remains still as one of the conventional properties of the dramatist, and one of the accepted traditions of the novelist. It is expressed in maxim and apothegm, in play and poem. One of our old pre-Elizabethan writers has put it in ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... great tendency to make capital of various kinds out of dying men's speeches. The lies that have been put into their mouths for this purpose are endless. The prime minister, whose last breath was spent 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. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... disgorge them all—dates of battles, maxims, memorabilia of all sorts, a heterogeneous mess. He's full to the brim, I tell you, and ready to explode. Suppose he did! How would you like to be hit in the midriff by an apothegm of Cicero, or be hamstrung by the subjunctive pluperfect of an irregular ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... the celestial abode, and born into the world as a man, in endeavoring to write out from memory, years after they were uttered, the Savior's words, it is probable that he unconsciously misapprehended and tinged them according to his theory. The Delphic apothegm, "Know thyself," was said to have ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... element in Woman. She is a child, but too full-grown for this man; he loves, but cannot follow her; yet is the association not without an enduring influence. Poesy has been domesticated in his life; and, though he strives to bind down her heavenward impulse, as art or apothegm, these are only the tents, beneath which he may sojourn for a while, but which may be easily struck, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... little pained to discover this unsuspected vein of cruelty in a woman I had long admired. And the woman merely became irrelevant with her apothegm ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... letter to Herbert,—writing it, literally, on her knees, transforming thus the simple deed into an act of devotion. Mandeville says that it is bad for her eyes, but the sight of it is worse for his eyes. He begins to doubt the wisdom of reliance upon that worn apothegm ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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
... at this time in the cook-house pounding rice, overheard this enigma. 'Excellent, it is excellent,' he ventured, 'but as far as completeness goes it isn't complete;' and having bethought himself of an apothegm: 'The P'u T'i, (an expression for Buddha or intelligence),' he proceeded, 'is really no tree; and the resplendent mirror, (Buddhistic term for heart), is likewise no stand; and as, in fact, they do not constitute any ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... be an admirer of old John Brown, any farther than sympathy with Whittier's excellent ballad about him may go; nor did I expect ever to shrink so unutterably from any apothegm of a sage, whose happy lips have uttered a hundred golden sentences, as from that saying (perhaps falsely attributed to so honored a source), that the death of this blood-stained fanatic has 'made the Gallows as venerable as the Cross!' ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... dangerous member of society. A newspaper starts the silly fallacy that "the rich are rich because the poor are industrious," and it is copied from one end of the country to the other as if it were a brilliant apothegm. "Capital" is denounced by writers and speakers who have never taken the trouble to find out what capital is, and who use the word in two or three different senses in as many pages. Labor organizations are formed, not to employ combined effort ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... Christopher de Thou, the first president, lauded the prudence of a monarch who had known how to bear patiently repeated insults, and at last to crush a conspiracy so dangerous to the quiet of the realm. And he quoted with approval the infamous apothegm of Louis the Eleventh: "Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare." The solitary suggestion that breathed any manly spirit was that of Pibrac, the "avocat-general," to the effect that orders should be published to put an end to the work of murder ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird |
