"Epigrammatical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in easy deshabille, with a flask of good wine, iced water, and delicate cakes and confitures before him, a witty and licentious epigrammatic poem close under his hand, sat lazily enjoying the luxuries that it had been his daughter's satisfaction to procure for him ever since her marriage. He sprang up to meet her with a grace and deference that showed ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fact, the whole farrago of the modern periodical. The pervading characteristics are Breton's invariable modesty, his pious and, if I may be permitted to use the word, gentlemanly spirit, and a fashion of writing which, if not very pointed, picturesque, or epigrammatic, is clear, easy, and on the whole rather superior, in observance of the laws of grammar and arrangement, to the work of men of much ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... to Wieland, "Life is a ticklish business—I propose to spend my time looking at it." This he did, viewing existence from every angle, and writing out his thoughts in terse, epigrammatic language. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... always been an outsider, and his life at Oxford had, you may perhaps hope, preserved his orthodoxy. He writes blank verse, though evidently the blank verse of a man accustomed to the 'heroic couplets'; he uses the conventional 'poetic diction'; he strains after epigrammatic point in the manner of Pope, and the greater part of his poem is an elaborate argumentation to prove the immortality of man—chiefly by the argument from astronomy. But though so far accepting the old method, ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... of Theocritus, also a universalist; the finest lyrical poets (who only take short flights, compared with the narrators); the purely contemplative poets who have more thought than feeling; the descriptive, satirical, didactic, epigrammatic. It is to be borne in mind, however, that the first poet of an inferior class may be superior to followers in the train of a higher one, though the superiority is by no means to be taken for granted; otherwise Pope would be superior to Fletcher, and Butler to Pope. Imagination, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... to move or resist. My pleasure, a very keen one, came from the imagined excitement produced by the thwarting of this desire. (Are not your own words—that 'emotion' is 'motion in a more or less arrested form'—an epigrammatic summary of all this, though in a somewhat different connection?) I did not undress her from any connection of nakedness with sexual feeling, but simply to enhance her feeling of helplessness and defenselessness under ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... recognized by two characteristics,—it must be brief, and it must have an unexpected turn of thought. This turn of thought may spring from an apparent contradiction, from the solemn assertion of a truism, from a play on words, or from other sources. There is an apparent contradiction in Wordsworth's epigrammatic line,— ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... in the family! How often do children ask what is right, and freely discuss the question! Here is a book rich in precept and example on at least many of the questions. There are pictures of actual lives meeting real temptations; there are the epigrammatic precepts of Proverbs and of the teachings of Jesus. Call attention to them, not as settling the question out of hand, but as testimony to the point. Accustom children to getting the light of the Bible on their lives, remembering that this ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... dinner was a riot. I have the clearest recollection of G. K. C. seated ponderously at the table, drinking champagne by magnums, continually feeding his face with food which, as he was constantly employed in the most dazzling and epigrammatic conversation, was apt to fall from his fork and rebound from his corporosity, until the fragments disappeared ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... a delightful book, witty, epigrammatic, flavorsome ... recalls Frank Stockton's bewitching foolery and ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... La Bruyere, writing the one at the beginning, the other towards the close, of the classical period, both practised the art of extreme brevity with astonishing success. The DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD was the first French writer to understand completely the wonderful capacities for epigrammatic statement which his language possessed; and in the dexterous precision of pointed phrase no succeeding author has ever surpassed him. His little book of Maxims consists of about five hundred detached sentences, polished ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... his. Indeed, I am often comparing his rather touchingly inflated naivete as of a small young person walking on tiptoe while he is talking of elevated things, at the time when he felt himself the author of that unwritten romance, with his present epigrammatic curtness and affectation of power kept strictly in reserve. His paragraphs now seem to have a bitter smile in them, from the consciousness of a mind too penetrating to accept any other man's ideas, and too equally competent in ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... have just referred—"to ignore this stage in George Eliot's mental development would be to lose one of the connecting links in her history." Furthermore, "nothing in her fictions excels the style of these papers." Here is all her "epigrammatic felicity," and an irony not surpassed by Heine himself, while her paper on the poet Young is one of her ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... the Writings of Goethe. Selected by Carrie Adelaide Cooke. With an Introduction by Kev. Alexander McKenzie, D.D. Boston: D. Lothrop & Co. Price $1.00. No other volume of the Spare Minute Series contains more real meat than this. Goethe was epigrammatic, and his ideas took the concentrated form of bullets, instead of scattering like shot. We doubt if there is another author, always excepting Shakespeare, from whose books so many noble and complete thoughts can be extracted. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... struggling with the problem of evil, sometimes borne down by a dismal skepticism, sometimes asserting his faith in the enduring righteousness. The writer's problem is the one to which Mr. Mallock has given an epigrammatic statement: "Is life worth living?" He greatly doubts, yet he strongly hopes. Much of the time it appears to him that the best thing a man can do is to enjoy the present good and let the world wag. But the outcome of all this struggle is the conviction that there is a life beyond this life and ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... was at the same time the brightest wit and most shameless punster of Westminster Hall; and such pride did he take in his reputation as a punster, that after the fashion of the wits of an earlier period he was often at considerable pains to give a pun a well-wrought epigrammatic setting. Bored with the long-winded speech of a prosy sergeant, he wrote on a slip of paper, which was in due course passed along the barristers' benches in the court ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... exercised by pamphlets, speeches, and, in later times, by the newspaper press. What does Mr. Pattison say to Burke's "Reflections on the French Revolution," to Paine's "Common Sense," to the tracts written by Halifax and Defoe at the time of the Revolution? Neither thought nor action is his epigrammatic condemnation of Milton's political writings, but an appeal which stirs men to action is surely both. Again of "Eikonoklastes" we are told that "it is like all answers, worthless as a book." Bentley's "Phalaris" ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... the Greeks and Romans were brief, pithy, and epigrammatic, and their collections were without any principle of connection. But, at the same time, though probably unknown to them, the same species of literature was flourishing elsewhere under a somewhat different form. It is made a question, whether Aesop, through the Assyrians, with whom the Phrygians ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... realism. Her fantasy overbalanced her reason, impeding its development and thus relegating it to a secondary role. "She is possibly the only French writer who possessed no esprit (in the sense that it is used in French society)—that playful, epigrammatic, querulous ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... Throughout his whole life he suffered from this neglect of early instruction. His letters, particularly, though they always "displayed the goodness of his heart, and frequently the strength of his native genius, with a certain laconic mode of expression, and an unaffected epigrammatic turn," were "fearfully and wonderfully made," the despair of his correspondents and the ridicule ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... and insipid: and Horace has many passages which, if not flat, pointless, or insipid in themselves, are painfully liable to become so in the hands of a translator. I have accordingly on various occasions aimed at epigram and pungency when there was nothing epigrammatic or pungent in the Latin, in full confidence that any trifling additions which may be made in this way to the general sum of liveliness will be far more than compensated by the heavy outgoings which must of necessity be the lot of every translator, and more particularly ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... were honoured for their briefness." The speech in question is far enough indeed from being a model of style either for oratory or anything else, but it is finely characteristic; while its studied primness and epigrammatic finish contrast most unfavorably with the frank-hearted yet artful eloquence ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... read the whole, turn to the admirable picture of camp-life on the Lower Rhine at the opening of Book VI. as a short contrast, while the story is full of others. Nor should one forget to add that Chateaubriand can, when he chooses, be epigrammatic as well as declamatory. "Such is the ugliness of man when he bids farewell to his soul and, so to speak, keeps house only with his body" is a phrase which might possibly shock La Harpe, but which is, as far as I remember, original, and is certainly ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... The epigrammatic style lends itself to quotation. Taste of the spring brings the traveller back to the same fountain on a day of greater leisure. Many times these "Beautiful Thoughts" have enlightened my darkness, and ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... that the cleverer they are the more publicity they get. Francesca probably reads your screeds at her Christian Endeavour meetings just as you cull extracts from Salemina's for your Current Events Club. In a word, the loosened leaf leads to the loosened tongue, and that's rather epigrammatic for ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Dr. Samuel Johnson, champion of the heavy-weights of English literature, the "Great Moralist," the typical Englishman of his time, wrote the pamphlet called "Taxation no Tyranny." It is what an Englishman calls a "clever" production, smart, epigrammatic, impertinent, the embodiment of all that is odious in British assumption. No part of the Old World, he says, has reason to rejoice that Columbus discovered the New. Its inhabitants—the countrymen of Washington and Franklin, of Adams and Jefferson—multiply, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... proverbs there are many of a kindly character. Some are semi-Christian in their wise benevolence. Many show great shrewdness of observation, and have an epigrammatic wit. We will ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... same discriminating mind. But as a revelation of both author and subject there are few more delightful papers than Burroughs's essay on Thoreau. In manner it is as pungent and as racy as Thoreau's writings, and as epigrammatic as Emerson's; and his defense of Thoreau against the English reviewer who dubbed him a "skulker" has the sound of the trumpet and the martial tread ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... vanished. He seemed, as he was, habitually oppressed by illness or discomfort. He sat for hours together in moody silence. When he opened his lips it was to pay an elaborate (and sometimes misplaced) compliment to a lady, or to utter an epigrammatic judgment on men or books, which recalled the conversational triumphs of his prime. Skill in phrase-making was perhaps the literary gift which he most admired. In a conversation with Mr. Matthew Arnold shortly before his death he said, ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... first question was, "What kind of a man was Mr. Pope in his conversation?" His Lordship answered, that if the conversation did not take something of a lively or epigrammatic turn, he fell asleep, or perhaps pretended to do so.' Johnson's Works (1787), xi. 200. Johnson in his Life of Pope (Works, viii. 309) says that 'when he wanted to sleep he ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... walked to the St Kilda station, from thence took the train to town, and Calton put into force his cross-examination. He might as well have tried his artful questions on a rock as on Vandeloup, for that clever young gentleman saw through the barrister at once, and baffled him at every turn with his epigrammatic answers ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... who has printed the entries, with running comment, in his "Music and Manners in the Classical Period" (London, 1898). Mr Krehbiel rightly describes some of the entries as mere "vague mnemonic hints," and adds that one entry which descants in epigrammatic fashion on the comparative morals of the women of France, Holland and England is unfit for publication. Looking over the diary, it is instructive to observe how little reference is made to music. One or two of the entries are plainly memoranda of purchases to be made for friends. There is one note ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... the terse and epigrammatic Painter. "Made rings round them. Haven't you finished yet? Well, chuck it, ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... youths at a University wine-party as "drinking bad wines, telling bad stories, singing bad songs over and over again. Milk punch—smoking—ghastly headache—frightful spectacle of dessert-table next morning, and smell of tobacco." But the satirist is often tempted to be epigrammatic at the expense of accuracy, and this picture is at least too highly coloured. In the recently published memoir of "J"—John Willis Clark—some reminiscences of the late Registrary are included; and "J" does not recognize Thackeray's ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... knowledge apparent in his poems is immense; and this alone suffices to secure variety in thought. But the aspiring and ardent nature of his intellect made him love to attempt also constant experiments in the theme and in the style. The romantic ballad, the classical tale, the lyric, the didactic, the epigrammatic—the wealth of his music comprehended every note, the boldness of his temper adventured every hazard. Yet still, (as in our Byron, in our Goldsmith, and as, perhaps, in every mind tenacious of its impressions,) some favourite ideas take possession of him so forcibly, as to be frequently ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... men who at that time, or since, have been known as mayors, alder-men, and councillors. Here, "Blue-brick Walker" first propounded his scheme for superseding the "petrified kidney" pavement. Here "Wedding-ring Edwards," in his quaint, sententious manner, growled out brief epigrammatic sentences, full of shrewdness and wisdom, most strangely seasoned with semi-contemptuous sarcasm. Here Isherwood Sutcliff, with his well-dressed, dapper figure, and his handsome Roman face, was wont to air his oratory; and here occasionally he, placing his right ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... Bradshaw, and discussed the weather. Bruce said how wonderful it was how some people always knew what sort of weather it was going to be. Madame Frabelle, who was getting sufficiently irritable to be epigrammatic, said that she never cared to know what the weather was going to be; the weather in England was generally bad enough when it came without the added misery of knowing about ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... perpetrated a pleasantry; and a Brazilian gentleman, whose luggage dropped to pieces and was scattered in the flood about the diligence, was looked upon as a very subtile humorist. Our own contribution to these witty passages was the epigrammatic display of a reeking trunk full of the pretty rubbish people bring away from Rome and Naples,—copies of Pompeian frescos more ruinous than the originals; photographs floating loose from their cards; little earthen busts reduced to the lumpishness of common clay; Roman scarfs stained and ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... Duke Alfred. His Highness posed as a conservative in some matters; it pleased him to revive memories of the long-buried past. He cared little about ghosts. He liked to take things in hand. After remarking in his brisk epigrammatic fashion that "not everything old is putrid," he devoted his attention to the Cave of Mercury and caused a flight of convenient stairs to be built, wide enough to admit the passage of two of his fattest Privy Councillors walking abreast, and leading down ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... which he himself had founded to increase the already vast income of the man to whom he owed his freedom. Polybius paid him a considerable portion of each year's profits, and had said one day at a banquet, with the epigrammatic wit of an Alexandrian, that his freedman, Andreas, served his interests as only one other man could do—namely, himself—but with the industry of ten. The Christian greatly appreciated his confidence; ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... at a distance of fifteen years from this Interview at Neustadt, Prince de Ligne, who was present there, has left us some record or loose lively reminiscence of it; [Prince de Ligne, Memoires et Melanges Historiques (Par. 1827), i. 3-21.]—sputtering, effervescing, epigrammatic creature, had he confined himself to a faithful description, and burnt off for us, not like a pretty fire-work, but like an innocent candle, or thing for seeing by! But we must take what we have, and endeavor to be thankful. By great luck, the one topic he insists ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... which, in the actual state of their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure: classicism, on the contrary, presents them with what gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great grand-fathers"—a definition which is epigrammatic, if not convincing.[8] De Stendhal (Henri Beyle) was a pioneer and a special pleader in the cause of French romanticism, and, in his use of the terms, romanticism stands for progress, liberty, originality, and the spirit of the future; classicism, for ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of their reasoning. You will never hear TRIFLING, AFFECTED, and far-sought conversations, at Madame de Monconseil's, nor at the hotels of Matignon and Coigni, where she will introduce you. The President Montesquieu will not speak to you in the epigrammatic style. His book, the "Spirit of the Laws," written in the vulgar tongue, will ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... sometimes above a crest, an idea perhaps derived from the "war-cries" of early times. Amotto may be emblematical, or it may have some allusion to the person bearing it, or to his name and armorial insignia; or it may be the epigrammatic expression of some sentiment in special favour with the bearer of it. As a matter of course, allusive mottoes, like allusive arms, afford curious examples of medival puns. Igive a few characteristic examples:—"Vero nil verius" ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... easily conceive the epigram which will be presented to Lord Auckland, or to the Duke of Bedford, as hereafter, according to circumstances, they may happen to represent this kingdom. Few can have so little imagination as not readily to conceive the nature of the boxes of epigrammatic lozenges that will ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... believer in objective Christianity, Grundtvig naturally exalts the God-given means of grace, the word and sacraments, through which the Spirit works. In one of the epigrammatic expressions often found in his writings, ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... than any other Lyly's spiritual heir—wrote nearly all his comedies in prose. And it is not fanciful I think to see in Lyly's pointed dialogue, tinged with euphuism, the forerunner of Congreve's sparkling conversation and of the epigrammatic writing of ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... shop, Sunday, I drew down from the shelf my Heinrich Heine ... in German ... one of the tasks I set myself, during that three months, was the making an intensive study of just how Heine had "swung" the lyric form to such conciseness, such effectiveness of epigrammatic expression. ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... brief, short, terse,close; to the point, exact; neat, compact; compressed, condensed, pointed; laconic, curt, pithy, trenchant, summary; pregnant; compendious &c. (compendium) 596; succinct; elliptical, epigrammatic, quaint, crisp; sententious. Adv. concisely &c. adj.; briefly, summarily; in brief, in short, in a word, in a few words; for shortness sake; to come to the point, to make a long story short, to cut the matter short, to be brief; it comes to this, the long and the short of it is. Phr. brevis ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of Mdme. de Chevreuse in scanning the prevailing aspect of the political horizon, her dauntless courage, the fidelity and devotion of her love. Retz, moreover, mistakes entirely the order of her adventures; he forgets and then invents. In striving after epigrammatic point, he sacrifices truth to smartness of style, and writes as though he looked upon events in which the passions of the Duchess made her take part as mere trifles, whereas among them there were some than which none were ever of graver or even ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... with his rhythms—from Ben Jonson, who said that "for not keeping accent, Donne deserved hanging," down to Coleridge, who declared that his "muse on dromedary trots," and described him as "rhyme's sturdy cripple." Coleridge's quatrain on Donne is, without doubt, an unequalled masterpiece of epigrammatic criticism. But Donne rode no dromedary. In his greatest poems he rides Pegasus like a master, even if he does rather weigh the poor beast down by carrying an ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... stones, that the wisdom of the earth looked but to the future, and that the study of the classics, however essential, is but the ground work for combining and working out the problems of the future. He was epigrammatic, terse, and gifted with a quaint humour, with which he was apt, even when in the driest philosophy, to drive in and clinch ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... side face of Christ; others a bust of Christ; but Isaiah gives us the full-length portrait of Christ. Other Scripture writers excel in some things. Ezekiel more weird, David more pathetic, Solomon more epigrammatic, Habakkuk more sublime; but when you want to see Christ coming out from the gates of prophecy in all His grandeur and glory, you involuntarily turn to Isaiah. So that if the prophecies in regard to Christ might be called the "Oratorio of the Messiah," the writing of Isaiah is the ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... prose, he speedily became known as a writer of brilliant epigrammatic essays and even more brilliant paradoxical plays such as An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. His aphorisms and flippancies were quoted everywhere; his fame as a wit was only surpassed by his notoriety ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... Jonson. To Fine Grand " Brainhardy " Doctor Empiric " Sir Samuel Fuller On Banks, the Usurer " Chevril the Lawyer Epigrammatic Verses by Samuel Butler Opinion Critics Hypocrisy Polish The Godly Piety Poets Puffing Politicians Fear The Law " " " " Confession Smatterers Bad Writers The Opinionative Language of the Learned Good Writing Courtiers Inventions Logicians Laborious ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... desirable had been latent in him also appeared at once, confirming his modest suspicions. Certainly he was a wit! Was not this perfectly charming girl's responsive and delicious laughter proof enough? Certainly he was epigrammatic! Certainly he could be easy, polished, amusing, sympathetic, and vastly interesting all the while. Could he not divine it in her undivided attention, the quick, amused flicker of recognition animating her beautiful face ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... lamely enough, in spite of the exquisite grace of his voice, and manner, and language, and the epigrammatic terseness of every sentence. He spent some minutes over the inscription of the psalm—allegorised it—made it mean something which it never did mean in the writer's mind, and which it, as Raphael well knew, never could mean, for his interpretation ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... exhibition the average man, woman and child would be attracted by different aspects of it; the man by the tone of the pictures, the woman by their color, the child almost wholly by the form or subject. The distinction is of course epigrammatic, but there is a basis for it in the daily associations of each of the three, the man with the conventional appointments of his dress and his business equipment, the woman with her gowns, her house decorations and flowers, the child with the world of imagination ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... knowledge, intellect, courage, or good qualities they may have, these men are unfit to command." It is possible that "tableau" should be construed rather in the sense of a pictorial composition, which, like an epigrammatic sentence, may be very complete and effective, but not ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... which contains a Tintoretto, averring that the sight of Tintoretto's pictures would injure his carefully trained taste. It is probable that neither anecdote is strictly true. Yet there is a certain epigrammatic point in both; and I have often speculated whether even Venice could have so warped the genius of Poussin as to shed one ray of splendour on his canvases, or whether even Tintoretto could have so sublimed the prophet of Queen Anne as to make him add dramatic passion to a London drawing-room. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... talk, and getting back or not, as it may happen, into the main line of idea with which they set out. Some of them are conceived in a vein of fine irony throughout. Others, like "The Journey to Brundusium," are mere narratives, relieved by humorous illustrations. But we do not find in them the epigrammatic force, the sternness of moral rebuke, or the scathing spirit of sarcasm, which are commonly associated with the idea of satire. Literary display appears never to be aimed at. The plainest phrases, the ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... theme—that he stands detached from it—still, his sympathies are indubitably subordinated to the effort, the successful effort, to bring off a neat point, to make a pun in the right place, to be striking, antithetical, epigrammatic. His verses have the finish, in their way, of Pope's couplet and Ovid's pentameter. His best known and most praised work appeals, primarily, to the taste and the ear: always, perhaps, to the head rather than to the heart. There is something of "hard brilliance" in Praed: he writes ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... dramatic technique for the beginner! But Fitch had the darting eye of a migratory interest. He often didn't "follow through," as they say in golf. With the result that he is often scored for insufficient motivation. But my knowledge of him makes me realize he felt and saw deeper than his epigrammatic style indicated. His technique was therefore often threadbare in spots,—not of that even mesh which makes of Pinero such an exceptional designer. I would put Fitch's "Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines" ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... You write about it beautifully, even if you're not very virile or epigrammatic or passionate. I won't ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... evidently much taken by him, and, fired by her manifest interest, he indulged in fantastic paradox and wild flights of fancy. Seemingly his exuberance stimulated Forbes, himself a well-informed and epigrammatic talker. ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... have said the beaux esprits of every age in one epigrammatic fashion or another. But frailty can bleed; in fact, ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... but he talks of his wife in a revolting way. I hated him for it. He thought he was being epigrammatic and brilliant.' ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... epigrammatic bits of philosophy, keenness of wit, and full insight into human nature, 'Concerning Isabel Carnaby' is ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... Commonwealth Constitution to create in the Senate a States' rights House I am amazed at the remoteness of the intention from the achievement. The Senate is as much a party House as is the House of Representatives. Nothing, perhaps, describes the position better than the epigrammatic if somewhat triumphant statement of a Labour Senator some time ago. "The Senate was supposed to be a place where the radical legislation of the Lower Chamber could be cooled off, but they had found that the saucer was hotter than ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... years which contains so much good writing, and so many fine and original comments on topics of current interest. Mr. Oracle Bluff is a self-opinionated, genial, whole-souled fellow.... His talk is terse, epigrammatic, full of quotable proverbs and isolated ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... representative than the great Peter Ivanovitch. Stripped of rhetoric, mysticism, and theories, she was the true spirit of destructive revolution. And she was the personal adversary he had to meet. It gave him a feeling of triumphant pleasure to deceive her out of her own mouth. The epigrammatic saying that speech has been given to us for the purpose of concealing our thoughts came into his mind. Of that cynical theory this was a very subtle and a very scornful application, flouting in its ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... didactic or satirical effusions. Crabbe, very wisely, remained faithful to the metre. For his purpose, and with his subjects and special gifts, none probably would have served him better. For narrative largely blended with the analytical and the epigrammatic method neither the stanza nor blank-verse (had he ever mastered it) would have sufficed. But in Crabbe's last published volumes it was not only the metre that was to seem flat and monotonous in the presence of new proofs of the ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... and epigrammatic writer, and had a command of English second to no scientist that England has ever produced. He was the only one of his group who had a distinct literary style. As a speaker he was quiet, deliberate, decisive, sure; and he carried enough reserve caloric so that he made his presence felt in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... promise of its title; and at best its author's knowledge of the subject, notwithstanding his continental wanderings, can have been but that of an external spectator. Still in an age when critical utterance was more than ordinarily full-wigged and ponderous, it dared to be sprightly and epigrammatic. Some of its passages, besides, bear upon the writer's personal experiences, and serve to piece the imperfections of his biography. If it brought him no sudden wealth, it certainly raised his reputation with the book-selling world. A connexion already begun with Smollett's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... thought and unflagging attention, have scarcely had their due weight with the general reader, nor secured their just meed of admiration. He was singularly careless, writes his editor, in distributing his pleasing illustrations of playfulness, or pathos, or epigrammatic expression. His 'mission' he considered to be that of an instructor and improver; and the flowers which, equally with more substantial things, were the produce of his vigorous intellect, he looked upon as scarcely worthy of passing attention, and deserving of no ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... with a lateral curve of his person when he talked about art which would alone have carried conviction, even if he had not had a thick, dark bang coming almost to the brows of his mobile gray eyes, and had not spoken English with quick, staccato impulses, so as to give it the effect of epigrammatic ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... fashionable London of yours," friend Sauerteig would say, "speaks a plain word to me. Every man feels bound to be something more than plain; to be pungent withal, witty, ornamental. His poor fraction of sense has to be perked into some epigrammatic shape, that it may prick into me;—perhaps (this is the commonest) to be topsyturvied, left standing on its head, that I may remember it the better! Such grinning inanity is very sad to the soul of man. Human faces should not grin on one like masks; they should look on one like faces! I love honest ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... works are to be Public Works, I suppose," grumbled Kilshaw, finding some comfort in this epigrammatic statement of the unwelcome ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... Mr. Clingman, who represented North Carolina, was alternately enlivened by epigrammatic wit or envenomed by scorching reply. Mr. Justin S. Morrill, of Vermont, was commencing a long and useful Congressional career. Mr. Schuyler Colfax, an editor- politician, represented an Indiana district. The veteran Mr. Charles J. Faulkner, with his choleric son-in-law, Mr. Thomas ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... know," responded Fenton, good-humoredly. "I am not in as epigrammatic a frame of mind as ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... remember those precious ones of the Sanctuary? A few days ago one of them turned up again. I found it in my great-coat pocket, and thought of you. I have seen the article in the Edinburgh about the Bible—exceedingly brilliant and clever, but rather too epigrammatic, quotations scanty and not correct. Ford is certainly a most astonishing fellow; he quite flabbergasts me—handbooks, review's, and I hear that he has just been writing a 'Life of Velasquez' for ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... 'naivete' of his is the more piquant from his being really a good-natured man, who unconsciously thinks aloud. Interest Ward on a subject, and I know no one who can talk better. His expressions are concise without being poor, and terse and epigrammatic without being ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... which runs through so much of the witty and epigrammatic fiction fashionable during the last eight or ten years, which runs through such works of a real though varying ingenuity as "Dodo," or "Concerning Isabel Carnaby," or even "Some Emotions and a Moral," may be expressed in ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... still remains unmatched. Amongst Dafydd's contemporaries and successors, Iolo Goch's noble poem, "The Labourer," very appropriate to our breadless days, Lewis Glyn Cothi's touching elegy on his little son John, and Dr. Sion Cent's epigrammatic "The Noble's Grave" have been treated as far as possible in the metres of the originals, and I have gone as near as I could to the measures of Huw Morus' "The Bard's Death-Bed Confession," Elis Win's "Counsel in view of Death," and the ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... success, that for a period he was the fashionable writer, and the court ladies even formed their conversation after the model of his Euphues. His comedy in prose, Campaspe, is a warning example of the impossibility of ever constructing, out of mere anecdotes and epigrammatic sallies, anything like a dramatic whole. The author was a learned witling, but ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... greater than any one who has lived with her. (Shall we mention Walt Whitman as the only possible exception? O. Henry came very near to her, but did he not melodramatize her a little, sometimes cheapen her by his epigrammatic appraisal, fit her too neatly into his plot? Kipling seemed to see her only as the brutal, heedless wanton.) Truly the magic of her spell can never be exacted. She changes too rapidly, day by day. Realism, as they call it, can never catch the boundaries ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... undue deference paid to the maiden's blush, at the encouragement of the mealy-mouthed and hypocritical; but it is a ground of very solid satisfaction, be the cause what it may, that recent American literature has been so free from the emasculate fin-de-siecle-ism, the nauseating pseudo-realism, the epigrammatic hysteria, that has of late been so rife in certain British circles. Moreover, it is impossible to believe that any really strong talent could have been stifled by the frown of the magazine editor. Walt Whitman made his mark without ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... diction, and his skilful use of a deep-toned voice, gave a remarkable impressiveness to all he said—even, indeed, to utterances which, if spoken by another, would sometimes have sounded commonplace or obvious. Sarcasm he could use with effect, and a telling point was often made by an epigrammatic phrase which delighted his hearers. And, more than all else, his meaning was never in doubt. In lucidity of statement he excelled many much greater orators, and was surpassed by none; and these qualities, added to his unmistakable sincerity and candour, made him one of the most ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... Lucilius to Strato, all show the same heaviness of handling and the same tiresome insistence on making a point, which prevent Martial's epigrams from being placed in the first rank. But while in any collection of Greek epigrammatic poetry these authors naturally sink to their own place, Martial, as well by the mere mass of his work—some twelve hundred pieces in all, exclusive of the cracker mottoes—as by his animation and pungent wit, set a narrow and rather disastrous ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... which condenses a thought or a metaphor, where one thing is said and another is to be applied. This often produces wit, and that quick pungency which excites surprise, but strikes with conviction; this gives it an epigrammatic turn. George Herbert entitled the small collection which he formed "Jacula Prudentium," Darts or Javelins! something hurled and striking deeply; a characteristic of a proverb which possibly Herbert may have borrowed from a remarkable passage in Plato's ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... was a genial and entertaining companion, unsurpassed in conversational powers, delighting in witty and sarcastic observations and epigrammatic sentences. He was elegant in his manners and bland and refined in his deportment. He was a skilful musician and passionately fond of children, and it was his wont in early life to gather them in groups about him and beguile ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... placed at the gates of Hell. I 170 concluded by observing, that the poem was not calculated to excite passion in any mind, or to make any impression except on poetic readers; and that from the culpable levity betrayed at the close of the eclogue by the grotesque union of epigrammatic wit with allegoric personification, in the allusion to the 175 most fearful of thoughts, I should conjecture that the 'rantin' Bardie', instead of really believing, much less wishing, the fate spoken of in the last line, in application to any human individual, would shrink from passing the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of course, will be smoked at other moments than epigrammatic ones, but on these other occasions you will not need to deal so fully with it in the stage directions. "Duke (lighting cigarette). I trust, Perkins, that ..." is enough. You do not want to say, "Duke (dropping ash on trousers). It seems to me, my love ..." or, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... accounts of his death. There is something strangely pitiful in that last desperate effort to achieve humour. We have all read the account of his own death that he dictated from the sick-bed—cold, epigrammatic, and, alas! characteristically lacking in taste. And once more it was his fate to make us rather ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... that Dr. Talmage enjoys been given in such fulness. Next in extent of influence, and with a like faculty of reaching immense and widely scattered masses of people, was the late Charles Haddon Spurgeon, a preacher of singularly homely power, Calvinistic in theology, epigrammatic in style, and with an earnest evangelical spirit which had a powerful influence on both hearers and readers. His sermons, like those of Dr. Talmage, were read in every land and were instrumental in conversions wherever they went. Strongly resembling Mr. Spurgeon in ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... (1779-1822) are written with extreme polish, erudition, judgment, and dignity. In Leopardi, philosophical acumen equals the elegance of his style. Giordani (d. 1848), as a critic and an epigraphist, deserves notice for his fine judgment and pure taste, as do Tommaseo and Cattaneo, who are both epigrammatic, witty, and pungent. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... neatness and polish of French verse; and, from his boyhood, his great ambition was to be "a correct poet." He worked and worked, polished and polished, until each idea had received at his hands its very neatest and most epigrammatic expression. In the art of condensed, compact, pointed, and yet harmonious and flowing verse, Pope has no equal. But, as a vehicle for poetry— for the love and sympathy with nature and man which every true poet must feel, Pope's verse is artificial; and its ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... one-sidedness and epigrammatic exaggeration can always be felt where whole groups of men are to be characterized. "The faults of the dwarf are sixty, of the red-haired man eighty, of the humpback a hundred, and of the one-eyed ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... his own improving conversation, and terminating in a supper of cold roast beef and salad, beguiles the golden evening until pretty late. Mr. Sapsea's wisdom being, in its delivery to mortals, rather of the diffuse than the epigrammatic order, is by no means expended even then; but his visitor intimates that he will come back for more of the precious commodity on future occasions, and Mr. Sapsea lets him off for the present, to ponder on the instalment ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... celebrated man, who is nameless, may be regarded as the master and maker of "Camille Maupin." He bought into order and shape the vast amount of knowledge already acquired by Felicite; increased it by study of the masterpieces with which Italy teems; gave her the frankness, freedom, and grace, epigrammatic, and intense, which is the character of his own talent (always rather fanciful as to form) which Camille Maupin modified by delicacy of sentiment and the softer terms of thought that are natural to a woman. He also roused in her a taste for German ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... the four great English poets, tells us, Chaucer's characteristic is intensity, Spenser's remoteness, Milton's sublimity, and Shakspeare's everything. The sentence is epigrammatic and memorable enough; but so far as Chaucer is concerned, it requires a little explanation. He is not intense, for instance, as Byron is intense, or as Wordsworth is intense. He does not see man like the one, nor nature like the other. ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... which lends such a charm to the author's essays,— brilliant, epigrammatic, vigorous. Indeed, herein lies the fault of the work, when viewed as a mere detail of historical facts. Its sparkling rhetoric is not the safest medium of truth to the simple-minded inquirer. A discriminating ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... was with the literary or writing sort. Nor have they failed to write about him, they among the others, about him and about him; and it is notable how little real light, on any point of his existence or environment, they have managed to communicate. Dim indeed, for most part a mere epigrammatic sputter of darkness visible, is the "picture" they have fashioned to themselves of Friedrich and his Country and his Century. Men not "of genius," apparently? Alas, no; men fatally destitute of true eyesight, and of loyal ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes." This was too bad. The sentence was misquoted, quoted without its qualifying conditions, and frightened some of my worthy professional brethren as much as if I had told them to throw all physic to the dogs. But for the epigrammatic sting the sentiment would have been unnoticed as a harmless overstatement ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and carry it forward to the conclusion. The conclusion should be a resultant summing the total of the suggestion in the preceding lines. . . . While the conclusion should leave a sense of finish and completeness, it is necessary to avoid anything like epigrammatic point." ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... sting is very epigrammatic, the whole of the distich has more of the truth than becomes prophecy; that is, it is false, for the spring is ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... was the most characteristic literary form in which the sages treasured and imparted their teachings. Poetical in structure, terse, often figurative or epigrammatic, the proverb was well calculated to arouse individual thought and make a deep impression on the mind. Transmitted from mouth to mouth for many generations, like the popular tradition or law, it lost by attrition all its ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... drawn by appearing before you as a personage of slender limb and deprecating glance, who stammers and makes a painful spectacle of himself when you ask him his opinion of "The Glees of the Gulches," by Popocatepetl Jones. The slender, dark-haired novelist of your imagination, with epigrammatic points to his mustache, suddenly takes the shape of a short, smoothly-shaven blond man, whose conversation does not sparkle at all, and you were on the lookout for the most brilliant of verbal fireworks. ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... in the works of the French tragic writers, who set no other aim before themselves but the delineation of the passions; and by indulging at one moment in a vaporous kind of pathos which makes them ridiculous, at another in epigrammatic witticisms, endeavor to conceal the vulgarity of their subject. I remember seeing the celebrated Mademoiselle Rachel as Maria Stuart: and when she burst out in fury against Elizabeth—though she did it very well—I could not help thinking ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... putting the question, because, quite sincerely, she herself admired no woman who was not of her own type. She was tempted to take advantage of Angela's desire not to be known, and say: "Oh, she's one of a thousand other pretty travelling women with intermittent husbands." This would have been epigrammatic, and at the same time it might have quenched dawning interest in the stranger. Neither the brother nor sister was of the sort who favoured flitting ladies with vague male belongings kept in the background. But suddenly a brilliant ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... sets out with a statement which he deems self-evident, namely, that, "in order to contend against the air, we must be specifically heavier than the air"—a truth which was also, we are told, announced by the first Napoleon in the epigrammatic sentence, "There can be no progress without resistance." From this the Frenchman proceeds to prove that, in order to command the air, it is necessary to support one's-self upon it, instead of being at its mercy; that we can only rest upon that which resists, ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... fact, full enough of merit to more than redeem its defects. The self-consciousness of the writer is less noticeable than in the other works, and the effort to be epigrammatic, short, sharp, and "telling" in style, is considerably modified. The interest is lively, continuous, and cumulative; and there is just enough tragedy in the story to make the happy ending all the happier. It was a ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... emotions; yet it is impossible to recall or to reconstruct; and when older people attempt to reconstruct it, they remember the emotions which underlay it, and the eager interests out of which it all sprang; and they make it something picturesque, epigrammatic, and vernacular which is wholly untrue to life. The fact is that the talk of schoolboys is very trivial and almost wholly symbolical; emotion reveals itself in glance and gesture, not in word at all. I suppose that most of us remember our boyish friendships, ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... touching her standard, deemed enchanted by her judges. It elicited one of those epigrammatic replies ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... such a priest on account of his sacred character; he regularly possessed the inviolability attaching also to heralds and envoys: and the proverb that represents him as being slain is (as Suidas notes) an effective bit of epigrammatic exaggeration. Other references to this proverb may be found (by those interested) in Rawlinson's note on the above passage of Herodotos, in one of the scholia on the Phoenician Maidens of Euripides (verse 1377), in Sturz's ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... scholars like Rai Sanyo spread broadcast over the country thus grew hands of iron and hearts of steel. This process shows how closely related are history and politics, and affords another illustration of the significance of the epigrammatic expression of Professor Freeman: "History is past politics, and ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga
... Winkle, M.D. Holmes's favorite measure, in his longer poems, is the heroic couplet which Pope's example seems to have consecrated forever to satiric and didactic verse. He writes as easily in this {490} meter as if it were prose, and with much of Pope's epigrammatic neatness. He also manages with facility the anapaestics of Moore and the ballad stanza which Hood had made the vehicle for his drolleries. It cannot be expected that verses manufactured to pop with the corks and fizz with the champagne ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... futile attempt to resist the passage of the Military Service Bill was chiefly remarkable for his epigrammatic description of the present SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WAR—"a man of great capacity, a man of most restless and versatile energy and unconquerable will, and of the most vivid and most illimitable and elusive vision of any politician ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... set in the background, to be limited in means, was always to him a source of anger, which manifested itself now in impassioned vehemence, now in vague, gloomy dreaminess, from which he would rise up again with some violent sarcasm or some epigrammatic remark. ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... power of Shakspeare, who squeezed meaning into a phrase with an hydraulic press, but he could carve a cherry-stone with any of the concellisti, and abounds in imaginative quaintnesses that are worthy of Donne, and epigrammatic tersenesses that remind us of Fuller. Nor is he wanting in poetic phrases of the purest crystallization. Here are a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... in strange cities that the children seemed like little men and women. "Yes," he said, "the Spaniards are not children until they are thirty or forty, and then they never grow up." It was perhaps too epigrammatic, but it may have caught at a fact. From another foreign sojourner I heard that the Catholicism of Spain, in spite of all newspaper appearances to the contrary and many bold novels, is still intense and unyieldingly repressive. But how far the severity of the church characterizes manners ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... epigrammatic expression of a commonplace truth, and the dullest remark on the worth of money is almost as sure of successful appreciation as the dullest remark on the worthlessness of women. Certainly I am a wit without ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... immortality upon less laziness and resignation than this temporary sojourner in Massachusetts. It is a common notion that the world (meaning the people in it) has become tame and commonplace, lost its primeval freshness and epigrammatic point. Mandeville, in his argumentative way, dissents from this entirely. He says that the world is more complex, varied, and a thousand times as interesting as it was in what we call its youth, and that it is as fresh, as individual and capable of producing odd ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... author's home. It deals with art, with journalism, and with human nature, and its love episodes are charming and true to life. The three women characters of the book are finely drawn and contrasted, there is much local color in the story, and a great deal of bright and epigrammatic writing. The author's previous book, "In the Country God Forgot," has been received with the utmost favor. The Boston Daily Advertiser says it "discloses a new writer ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... pocket-money at a single sitting at that noble game. And the conversation of the Blade must always be brilliant in the extreme, like the flashing of steel in the sunlight. It is usually cynical and worldly, sometimes horrible enough to make a governess shudder, but always epigrammatic. Epigrams and neat comparisons are much easier to make than is vulgarly supposed. "Schoolmasters hang about the crops of knowledge like dead crows about a field, examples and warnings to greedy souls." "Marriage ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... history of commerce in the Indies, welded to it the declamation of Diderot. The Abbe Barthelemy covered over the realities of Greek manners and customs with his literary varnish. Science was expected to be either epigrammatic or oratorical; crude or technical details would have been objectionable to a public composed of people of the good society; correctness of style therefore drove out or falsified those small significant facts which give a peculiar sense and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... poetical metaphors, and presenting a misty grandiose picture of the universe; but gradually they felt the want of some logical basis for their speculations, and Hegel became their favourite. Gallantly they struggled with the uncouth terminology and epigrammatic paradoxes of the great thinker, and strove to force their way through the intricate mazes of his logical formulae. With the ardour of neophytes they looked at every phenomenon—even the most trivial incident of common life—from the philosophical ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... danger, that this atmosphere may be corrupted with poisonous exhalations from lower and more malarious levels, and the question of sanitation becomes more instant and pressing. Democracy in its best sense is merely the letting in of light and air. Lord Sherbrooke, with his usual epigrammatic terseness, bids you educate your future rulers. But would this alone be a sufficient safeguard? To educate the intelligence is to enlarge the horizon of its desires and wants. And it is well that this should be so. But the enterprise ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... which would come upon him from time to time, it occurred to M. Linders to reflect upon his misdeeds, and adopt an apologetic tone concerning them, he was wont to propound a singular theory respecting his life, averring, in general terms, that it had been spoilt by women,— a speech more epigrammatic, perhaps, than accurate, since of the two women who had loved him best, his mother and his wife, he had broken the heart of the one, and ruined the happiness of the other. And yet it was not without its grain of meaning, however false and distorted; for M. Linders, ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... concerned with the veracity of the matter of his verses—even leaving out of the question his enmity towards the House of Borgia, which will transpire later. For him a ben trovato was as good matter as a truth, or better. He measured its value by its piquancy, by its adaptability to epigrammatic rhymes. ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... 1865-66, I met Dannevig frequently at clubs, student festivals, and social gatherings, and his melodious voice, his epigrammatic talk, and his beauty never failed to extort from me a certain amount of reluctant admiration. I could not help noticing, however, that his charming qualities were all very much on the surface, and as for his ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Mr. CARTON, is not a brilliant play, as its dialogue lacks epigrammatic sparkle: neither is it an interesting play, as the plot, such as it is, is too weak for words,—which, by the way, at once accounts for the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... great ladies, had some right to complain of the absurdity that had been put in their mouths, before the days of Waverley;[439] but neither does Scott's dialogue bear criticism. His lords brave each other in smart epigrammatic speeches, but the dialogue is in costume, and does not please on the second reading; it is not warm with life. In Shakespeare alone, the speakers do not strut and bridle, the dialogue is easily great, and he adds ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Mulvaney (Terence). Rollicking, epigrammatic, harum-scarum Irish trooper, in the Indian service, whose adventures and sayings are narrated in Soldiers Three, The Courting of Dinah Shadd, etc., by ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... so much govern themselves as misgovern the Protestant minority,' cried Sir Asher, becoming almost epigrammatic in his excitement. 'Home Rule simply means the triumph ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... are few. Two little educational books are worth mentioning: a book of Latin prose exercises, called Nuces, the sentences of which are full of recondite allusions, curious humour, and epigrammatic expression; and a slender volume for teaching Latin lyrics, called Lucretilis, the exercises being literally translated from the Latin originals which he first composed. Lucretilis is not only, as Munro said, the most Horatian verse ever written since Horace, ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... to be epigrammatic," she retorted, "it doesn't suit your mental complexion. I'll be glad, then, when my youth has passed. It's a time of turmoil during which one can't really think clearly. Give me ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... the three, was gifted, with the brilliant wit and power of repartee which they (especially Lady Dufferin) possessed in common with her, united to the exceptional beauty with which they were all three endowed. Mrs. Norton was extremely epigrammatic in her talk, and comically dramatic in her manner of narrating things. I do not know whether she had any theatrical talent, though she sang pathetic and humorous songs admirably, and I remember shaking ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... too much haste, or busied and taken up with other concerns." It is this fulness of anecdote, which, perhaps, more than any other quality of his writings, makes him the favorite of boys as well as of men. He treasures up pithy sayings, and his own reflections are often epigrammatic in expression, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... meetings, and in which 'winged words' and flying notes of merry gentlemen and friends were obviously incorporated." No! certainly wings and flying are not the ideas that naturally associate with the historian of the Roxburghe, although, in one instance, the dinner is sketched off in the following epigrammatic sentence, which startles the reader like a plover starting up in a dreary moor: "Twenty-one members met joyfully, dined comfortably, challenged eagerly, tippled prettily, divided regretfully, and paid the bill most cheerfully." ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... volume of verse came under my notice for review, and in my customary light-hearted fashion I held it up to general derision for a column or two, and then dismissed it, with an ineffaceable epigrammatic kick, to spin for ever (approximately) down the ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... might speak of those years at Washington when in the gallery we worked shoulder to shoulder; I might recall to you the wit of Hannum, or remind you of the darkling Barrett, the mighty Decker, the excellent Cohen, the vivid Brown, the imaginative Miller, the volatile Angus, the epigrammatic Merrick, the quietly satirical Splain, Rouzer the earnest, Boynton the energetic, Carson the eminent, and Dunnell, famous for a bitter, frank integrity. I might remember that day when the gifted Fanciulli, with no more delicate inspiration than crackers, onions, and cheese, and no more splendid ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... I said, realizing as I said it the miserable inadequacy of the English language. At a crisis when I would have given a month's income to have said something neat, epigrammatic, suggestive, yet withal courteous and respectful, I could only find a hackneyed, unenthusiastic phrase which I should have used in accepting an invitation from a bore to lunch with him ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... with an etymological reason for every word. Sometimes he is quite felicitous. Now and then he uses metaphor with skill and illumination. The habitual concreteness of his style shows the clearness of his perceptions. Occasionally he is epigrammatic "Strong enemies," he says in one place, "are better to us than weak friends. They show us our weak points." Finer and higher is another passage in the same sermon—"The yearning of multitudes is not in vain. After yearning comes impulse, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... outran Bourdaloue. In his own sphere, that of unimpassioned appeal to reason and to conscience, Bourdaloue is still without a rival. No one else, certainly, ever earned, so well as he, the double title which his epigrammatic countrymen were once fond of bestowing upon him,—"The king of preachers, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... true man that he viewed it, and undertook to cultivate it; and its inspirations constantly maintained the noblest temper in his soul. The end of Literature was not, in Schiller's judgment, to amuse the idle, or to recreate the busy, by showy spectacles for the imagination, or quaint paradoxes and epigrammatic disquisitions for the understanding: least of all was it to gratify in any shape the selfishness of its professors, to minister to their malignity, their love of money, or even of fame. For persons who degrade it to such purposes, the deepest contempt of ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... writers have given to us battles, laws, histories, songs; now we have in Solomon's writings a new style in short, epigrammatic sentences. The proverb was the most ancient way of teaching among the Greeks. The seven wise men of Greece each had his own motto on which he made himself famous. These were engraved on stone in public places. Thus the gist of an argument or a long discussion ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... on the terrace and a little way up the zigzag path. The day was superb. I found Mr. Tillington, in spite of his studiously languid and supercilious air, a most agreeable companion. He knew Europe. He was full of talk of Rome and the Romans. He had epigrammatic wit, curt, keen, and pointed. We sat down on a bench; he kept Lady Georgina and myself amused for an hour by his crisp sallies. Besides, he had been everywhere and seen everybody. Culture and agriculture seemed ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... "Oh, epigrammatic sentences expressive of moral feelings or virtues," replied my neighbour easily. "They are not quite as formal and hackneyed now as they were in the olden time, when some of the favourite toasts were 'May the pleasure of the ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... been towed up the Mincio past Vergil's home when he was a lad of about thirteen. Indeed we hope he was out fishing that day and shared his catch with the home-returning travelers. Parodies are usually not works of artistic importance, and this for all its epigrammatic neatness is no exception to the rule. But it is not without interest to catch the poet at play for a moment, and learn his opinion on a political character ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... interrupting him, "that you have hit upon those admirable methods of deception which I was intending to describe in a Meditation entitled The Act of Putting Death into Life! Alas! I thought I was the first man to discover that science. The epigrammatic title was suggested to me by an account which a young doctor gave me of an excellent composition of Crabbe, as yet unpublished. In this work, the English poet has introduced a fantastic being called Life in Death. This personage crosses ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... imitation. Human life is burlesqued, personal defect heightened and ridiculed; character is never represented in degree, but in extremes. The dialogue of satirical comedy assumes naturally the form of the apophthegm—it is epigrammatic and compressed that it may be pungent and striking. Hence, no species of writing is more allied to or more likely to pass into household words, and to become proverbs among a people of quick retentive powers, such ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... certainly viewed the sunny side of his character; and that too I am disposed to think, with a burning glass. I have passed many hours in his society, pleased with his wit and epigrammatic sallies, but strive in vain to call to my recollection "the spontaneous flow of his Latin, his quotations from the ancient and modern poets, and his masterly and eloquent developement of every subject that his acute intellect chose to dilate upon." His conversation ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... debarred himself from success in the matter of appointments, in the first place, by limiting his range of choice through unwillingness to have about him those who did not share his point of view. It is more epigrammatic than exact to say that he was the sole unit in the Government giving value to a row of ciphers, for his Cabinet, as a whole, was not composed of weak men. But the fact that the members of his Cabinet accepted ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... Like the three which have been excepted for praise, each is in a manner sui generis, while the whole group stands, in a manner also, apart from others and by itself. There is astonishing cleverness everywhere, in regard to almost every point of novel-composition, though with special regard to epigrammatic phrase. But the whole is inorganic somehow, and more than somehow unreal; without (save in the cases mentioned) attaining that obviously unreal but persuasive phantasmagoria which some great writers ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... which on the Italian pastoral is evident, is padded with a good deal of farce, but though the construction never evinces any great power on the part of the author, it is not on the whole inadequate. The verse is in great part rimed in couplets, and there are frequent attempts at epigrammatic effect, which at times lead to some obscurity. The language betrays, as in the case of the author's eclogues, a pseudo-archaism, which points, particularly in such phrases as 'doe ycleape,' to a perhaps unfortunate ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... lyrical, didactic, and epigrammatic poetry found but feeble representation. The religious festival chants—as to which the annals of this period certainly have already thought it worth while to mention the author—as well as the monumental ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... logical consecutiveness of its fugues, the indisputableness of its well-classified statements, the swift pertinence of the repartees of the first violin to the second, the apt resume and orderly reorganization of their epigrammatic interchanges by the 'cello and the double-bass, the steady typewritten report and summary of the whole by the pianoforte, and the regretful exception to so many points taken by the clarionet. If so, you have no doubt felt, as we have, a ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... Corn-law Rhymer." He was born and died in Yorkshire. He was the author of several pleasing poems, of a somewhat epigrammatic character. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... That is, unless it is literary, musical, artistic gossip. Scandal ruins conversation, and should never be included even in a definition of small-talk. Polite, humorous, vivacious, speculative, dry, sarcastic, epigrammatic, intellectual, and practical people all meet around a dinner-table, and much agreeable small-talk should be the result. It is unfortunately true that there is sometimes a failure in this respect. Let a hostess ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... later Bibles she used are in existence, and bear testimony to the thoroughness of her methods. Almost every page is a mass of interlineations and notes. As one turns them over, phrases here and there catch the eye, arresting in thought and epigrammatic in form; such ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... Billy boy! That sounds almost epigrammatic. Hullo! You hit? Stoop down here, man. ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... then the world calls us absurd. Oh, thou joyous artlessness 'mongst the poor maidens of Leipzig, Witty simplicity come,—come, then, to glad us again! Comedy, oh repeat thy weekly visits so precious, Sigismund, lover so sweet,—Mascarill, valet jocose! Tragedy, full of salt and pungency epigrammatic,— And thou, minuet-step of our old buskin preserved! Philosophic romance, thou mannikin waiting with patience, When, 'gainst the pruner's attack, Nature defendeth herself! Ancient prose, oh return,—so nobly and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller |
