aphorisms

He spouted neo-post-Beat banalities like Picasso drew for kicks.

Aphorisms are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling.

An aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general.

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.

The excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some useful truth in a few words.

Aphorisms are thoughts one might have . . . expressed . . . by someone recognizably wiser than oneself.

An aphorism is [that which] drags from obscurity a recognizable intuition by clothing it in words.

Aphorisms are salted not sugared almonds at Reason's Feast.

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth."