Wallace Shawn

Interestingly, the actress who, in her own persona, may be gentle, shy, and socially awkward, someone whose hand trembles when pouring a cup of tea for a visiting friend, can convincingly portray an elegant, cruel aristocrat tossing off malicious epigrams in an eighteenth-century chocolate house.

American Actor

Nicolas Chamfort

Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.

French Writer

F. H. Bradley

Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

British Philosopher

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Audiences are always better pleased with a smart retort, some joke or epigram, than with any amount of reasoning.

American Writer

William Cowper

An epigram is but a feeble thing - With straw in tail, stuck there by way of sting.

English Poet

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.

W. Somerset Maugham

Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.

British Playwright

Delmore Schwartz

All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.

American Poet

Karl Kraus

Feminine passion is to masculine as an epic is to an epigram.

Austrian Writer

Hendrik Willem Van Loon

Somewhere in the world there is an epigram for every dilemma.

American Journalist

An epigram is concise, delivering a sharp point or joke in few words.

Brief Sharpness

Epigrams often have a humorous or ironic twist, critiquing a social norm or behavior.

Satirical Tone

Familiarity with the culture or context enhances appreciation of an epigram's wit or sarcasm.

Cultural References

An epigram on a structure is meant to offer lasting insight or remembrance.

Enduring Words

Epigrams on buildings or statues often encapsulate the essence or purpose of the edifice.

Inscription Purpose

Statues and buildings in public spaces frequently bear epigrams to inspire or educate the community.

Public Spaces

 history's just interesting that's all and indeed it is none more so than the longest human history of all the history of Africa that you've just heard so eloquently described still we're drawn to these these epigrams these simple statements about what it

Africa’s rhyming history...

 "It is not how things are in the world that is the mystical, it's that the world exists." And if you don't like taking your epigrams from a philosopher, try a scientist. John Archibald Wheeler, one of the great physicists of the 20th century,