epigram

A concise, clever, often paradoxical statement or line of verse. Adjective: epigrammatic.

See also:

• Aphorism
• Balanced Sentence
• Brevity
• Commonly Confused Words: Epigram, Epigraph, and Epitaph
• Epigraph
• Maxim
• "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young," by Oscar Wilde
• Proverb
• Sententia

Etymology:

Examples and Observations:

• "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."
  (Tacitus)



• "I am not young enough to know everything."
  (Oscar Wilde)



• "Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing."
  (Oscar Wilde)



• "No one is completely unhappy at the failure of his best friend."
  (Groucho Marx)



• "The only 'ism' Hollywood believes in is plagiarism."
  (Dorothy Parker)



• "Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine."
  (Fran Lebowitz)



• "Audiences are always better pleased with a smart retort, some joke or epigram, than with any amount of reasoning."
  (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)



• "What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul."
  (Samuel Coleridge)



• "The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram."
  (Don Marquis)



• "A brilliant epigram is a solemn platitude gone to a masquerade ball."
  (Lionel Strachey)



• "Three things must epigrams, like bees, have all:
  A sting and honey and a body small."
  (Latin verse, quoted by J. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, 1877)



• Renaissance Epigrams: Gall, Vinegar, Salt, and Honey
  "In the Renaissance, George Puttenham remarked that the epigram is a 'short and sweete' form 'in which every mery conceited man might without any long studie or tedious ambage, make his friend sport, and anger his foe, and give a prettie nip, or shew a sharpe conceit [i.e., idea] in few verses' (The Art of English Poesy, 1589). Epigrams of both praise and blame were a popular Renaissance genre, notably in the poetry of Ben Jonson. The critic J.C. Scaliger in his Poetics (1560) divided epigrams into four kinds: gall, vinegar, salt, and honey (that is, an epigram could be bitterly angry, sour, salacious, or sweet)."
  (David Mikics, A New Handbook of Literary Terms. Yale University Press, 2007)



• Types of Epigrams
  "The Epigram is expressed in various ways:

  A. In the Epigrammatic style. It now refers to a style marked by point and brevity. It does not necessarily involve contrast.
  B. Emphatic assertion. "What I have written, I have written."
  C. Indirect or concealed statement. A kind of mingling of literal and figurative.
  D. Punning
  E. Paradox

  (T. Hunt, Principles of Written Discourse, 1884)