Proverbs are potted wisdom. [ Charles Buxton ]
Apology is only egotism wrong side out. [ O. W. Holmes ]
I love to lose myself in other men's minds. [ Lamb ]
Apothegms form a short cut to much knowledge. [ Hood ]
All generalizations are dangerous, even this one. [ Dumas, Fils ]
Potted wisdom: Short sentences drawn from long experiences. [ Cervantes ]
Collect as precious pearls the words of the wise and virtuous. [ Abd el-Kader ]
They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps. [ Shakespeare ]
Books are the beehives of thought; laconics the honey taken from them. [ James Ellis ]
An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly. [ Whipple ]
The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the physician's aphorism, and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it. [ Carlyle ]
Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms; and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism. [ Coleridge ]
How many of us have been attracted to reason, first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism. [ Lord Lytton ]
I fancy mankind may come in time to write all aphoristically, except in narration; grow weary of preparation and connection and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. [ Dr. Johnson ]
If these little sparks of holy fire which I have thus heaped up together do not give life to your prepared and already enkindled spirit, yet they will sometimes help to entertain a thought, to actuate a passion, to employ and hallow a fancy. [ Jeremy Taylor ]