Concentrate on the surrounding conditions you want to produce, and avoid excuses for not living a fruitful life. Pietro Grieco believes proverbs and epigrams can be used as stepping stones, seeds of inspiration, and sparks of creativity. With the idea of inspiring and empowering others, Pietro shares a compilation of over two hundred meaningful sayings that he hopes can help people discover fortitude, elevation, and joy within daily living. Grieco, a doctor of divinity and the president of the Foundation for Development of Spiritual Thinking, relies on both his personal and professional experiences as he offers condensed gems of positive wisdom that can be perused either by theme or randomly as affirmations, meditations, or reflections.
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Through his thoughtful writings, Grieco subtly encourages us to practice consistent mindfulness while musing about such relatable themes as suffering, gratitude, humility, prayer, forgiveness, and transformation. Brief Ideas with Great Power provides inspiration for anyone ready to be lifted up by a new perspective on life.
Poetry is epigrammatic in essence.
It always strives for brevity of expression, leaving to the mind of the reader the pleasure of amplifying the idea. It may be regarded as a supra-phrasal unit inasmuch as it is semantically connected with the preceding lines and at the same time enjoys a considerable degree of independence. The inner quality of any sentence to which the rank of epigram, in the generic sense of the term, can be attributed, is that the particularity of the event is replaced by a timeless non-particularity.
A quotation is a repetition of a phrase or statement from a book, speech and the like used by way of authority, illustration, proof or as a basis for further speculation on the matter in hand. Moreover, we give it the status, temporary though it may be, of a stable language unit. What is quoted must be worth quoting, since a quotation will inevitably acquire some degree of generalization.
If repeated frequently, it may be recognized as an epigram, if, of course, it has at least some of the linguistic properties of the latter. Quotations are usually marked off in the text by inverted commas " " , dashes — , italics or other graphical means.
They are mostly used accompanied by a reference to the author of the quotation, unless he is well known to the reader or audience. A quotation is the exact reproduction of an actual utterance made by a certain author. The work containing the utterance quoted must have been published or at least spoken in public; for quotations are echoes of somebody else's words. Utterances, when quoted, undergo a peculiar and subtle change.
Proverbs and Epigrams
They are rank-and-file members of the text they belong to, merging with other sentences in this text in the most natural and organic wayf bearing some part of the general sense the text as a whole embodies; yet, when they are quoted,, their significance is heightened and they become different from other parts of the text.
Once quoted, they are no longer rank-and-file units.
A quotation is always4 set against the other sentences in the text by its greater volume of sense and significance. Quotations, unlike epigrams, need not necessarily be short. A whole paragraph or a long passage may be quoted if it suits the purpose. It is to be noted, however, that sometimes in spite of the fact that the exact wording is used, a quotation in a new environment may assume a new shade of meaning, a shade necessary or sought by the quoter, but not intended by the writer of the original work.
A good epigram can change your life.
Best Funny Epigrams
It guides your decisions. It admonishes you to be better. Over the course of the centuries, wise people have been producing these thoughts. Little reminders about how to live, how to think, how to be. There are even epigrams about epigrams. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote:. The journey to wisdom is incomplete without drawing on these wonderful insights.
Personally, I flip through my various books of epigrams on a regular basis, knowing that good stuff will jump out at me. I also keep my own collection of epigrams in my commonplace book , organized by section. If I am looking for a good thought about relationships or money or fear, I know just which notecards to pull out. Below are some essential collections that I think belong in every library or on every nightstand, along with some of my favorite lines from each.
Some Fruits Of Solitude: This is a good little book of aphorisms and sayings from the 17th century by the founder of Pennsylvania, the Quaker William Penn. I actually liked the short bio of Penn more than the aphorisms themselves, but there are definitely some gems in here. The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus: A Roman Slave by Publius Syrus.
Publius Syrus was a Syrian slave in first century BC who earned his freedom and education by impressing his master with sharp wit and intelligence. Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, was quoted extensively by Marcus Aurelius and Plato, but most of his work is lost. This book, which we are lucky to have, contains all the surviving fragments from his writings.
It is about a hundred pages and I probably marked 70 of them.