“If, with the literate, I am/ Impelled to try an epigram,/ I never seek to take the credit;/ We all assume that Oscar said it.”
Dorothy Parker
“Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route.”
Charles Caleb Colton
“Each type of industry was on the march toward the West, impelled by an irresistible attraction. Each passed in successive waves across the continent. Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file-- the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer --and the frontier has passed by. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between.”
Frederick Jackson Turner
“Feminine passion is to masculine as an epic is to an epigram”
Karl Kraus
“I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ”
William James
“An epigrams is a gag that's played Carnegie Hall”
Oscar Levant
“An epigram is but a feeble thing - With straw in tail, stuck there by way of sting”
William Cowper
