Epigrams
Epigram: A half-truth posing as wisdom.
William S. E. Coleman
Over the years I have kept a file of epigrams that popped into my mind.
Below you will find a first sampling.
I have also added additional epigrams and categories - some by me,
some by others - and will continue to do so in the coming weeks.
Last Updated: March 7, 2009
MY FINAL WORDS IN A CLASSROOM
A professional gets it done. An artist reaches for the stars.
MUNDANE OBSERVATIONS
Admiral Richard Byrd was bi-Polar.
Comedians shtick it to us.
Oedipus’ Significant (M)other; or he found out she was his stepmother so he only put out one eye.
During an Iowa winter the brass monkeys sing soprano.
HISTORY, WAR, AND POLITICS
All societies select what they want to remember. Thus history.
History should not be examined through a magnifying glass.
Fascism happens when a sadist elite rules a nation of masochists.
Republican logic: We must take away your liberties so we can protect them.
When it's giving government money to the poor, it's bleeding heart liberalism's big spending – or even socialism; when it's giving government money to the rich, it's patriotism.
In attaining any just goal, compromise is necessary. Therefore all just goals are attained by corruption.
Conservatives want the world to be like it used to never was.
Republican logic: We must take away your liberties so we can protect them.
Home schooling is parents' right to pass along their ignorance to their children.
The oppressed of one century become the oppressors of the next.
No economic system is worth one young soldier's life.
Democracy is much too important to leave to the general public.
Terrorists are those who fight to protect their country from American intervention. Freedom fighters fight to help us to invade their country so we can plunder their natural resources.
The morality of any given government is equal to that of its most depraved citizen - who, incidentally, is a politician.
Politics at its best reduces the power of the rich. Usually it is the other way around.
The Neanderthals became extinct about 30,000 BC. Don’t count on it.
The leftist is accused of class warfare when he questions the accumulation of great wealth. That is a war medal we should wear proudly.
All who rule will be judged by history. Human tragedy is that judgment comes long after our oppressors are dead.
History is the study of the criminal activities of nations over hundreds of centuries. Our government is the few working remove justice from the lives of the many. The study of cultural history is the study of the repression of the nobility of the human spirit.
As long as there’s one hungry child in this world, there is no justification for the existence of great wealth.
The only rational thing to do in this world is to weep for humanity.
Has anyone stopped to realize that Christ was a Communist?
Beware of good Christian gentlemen.
One man’s patriotism is another man’s terrorism.
Americans have an infinite capacity for nostalgia toward events that never happened.
COSMIC CONCERNS
One man's myth is another man's religion.
Noah's flood was a pre-Christian form of baptism.
When legends die, dreams die; and when dreams die there is no reality.
The only absolute is the inexplicable.
The irrational is more profound and complex than the rational.
Truth is found in the inexplicable.
Discussing metaphysics is like arguing over the quality of air in a vacuum.
A successful religion condemns the sins its parishioners aren’t interested in committing.
Greek tragedy taught me one thing: No matter what you do, fate has you by the balls.
The more cosmic your thinking becomes, the more important your immediate life becomes.
One man’s myth is another man’s religion.
To become a god, you must kill the gods that came before you.
God created man and woman. Then he died laughing.
Religion is generated by the fear that we have only one time around.
If Christ came back, he wouldn't come back as a fundamentalist Christian.
Gods only exist when we believe in them.
What strange show awaits when this reality ceases to be?
The Neanderthals became extinct about 30,000 BC. Don’t count on it.
We have to believe in the existence of the pure evil so we can escape the fathomless terror of the imbecility of the human race.
LIFE AND THE MEANING OF IT ALL
The worst thing that can happen to you is to kill another human being.
Who is the most moral? The person who does good out of a fear of hell, or a person who does it because it is right?
When you combine your profession with your most beloved hobby, you've beaten the system.
Those who don’t know what they are doing usually are doing it.
The worst thing that can happen to you is to kill another human being.
Our generation is Jung and a-Freud.
Familiarity breeds attempt.
If I knew then what I know now, I'd be dead.
Whatever you end up doing, love it!
A rigid belief is a cancer on the human mind.
In the good old days we listened to our elders - then we ignored them.
If you want to get in the rat race, you have to be a rat.
Consciousness, that boring time between naps.
There are many better things to talk about than the quality and quantity of our bowel movements.
Nature's joke is that it makes us horny before we can handle it.
It's hard to soar with the eagles when you're surrounded by turkeys.
Symbolic castration, as with Uranus, is done so the son is sure that his father will not create another monster like himself. This is why old men start wars. They want to head off their castration by their sons.
The baby frequently pisses in its bathwater. Occasionally, it poops there too. This becomes its model of how it treats its environment when it becomes an adult.
Mental health is attained when you discover you are normal and the rest of the world is stark raving nuts.
I’d rather be doing it than remembering it.
If you never stop talking, you never learn anything more than you already know.
The greatness of an idea depends on who's listening.
When you've combined your profession with your most beloved hobby, you've beaten the system.
When women feel slighted, they are upset; when men feel slighted, they know where the stand with the other fellow.
Blessed are the mice for they shall eat the cheese.
If you have no fantasies, you do not exist. Why? Realism is what you choose to recognize. Therefore realism is a fantasy. Reality is a fantasy that we live with because we accept it as real, even when it is improbable. All the rest is sordid and unreal.
Logic is the ultimate human conceit. It does not exist except in the artificial systems we construct. The only value of logic is its lovely symmetry. It is a lovely decoration we devise because we are too cowardly to cope with the chaos of our world and their universe.
Logic allows us to be wrong with confidence.
Whatever you end up doing, love it!
WRITING AND ART
By the time we arrive at a critical consensus an art form is dead.
When a system deprives its creative people from realizing their creativity, the system is in error. Those who are deprived of their full realization do not suffer because creative people have a rich interior life. They are the soul of a system, and it is the system's loss, not theirs because the system has lost its soul.
A broken sentence is a flat tire on the road to your denouement.
Writing long is easy, writing short is hard.
Each generation discovers old ideas for the first time.
Don't let your writing style get in the way of your characters.
Form rarely comes first. It arises out of the characters. Then when your rough hewn, half-realized characters are drafted, technique and form are applied. Form allows these newly born creatures their first breath, their first struggle with the reality of themselves. Then, and only then, tragedy or comedy is born.
One pause per paragraph. (This also applies to acting, unless you are Pinter or acting Pinter.)
To be a work of art of the first rank there must be an over-arching metaphor that soars above the humanity of its characters.
A simple declarative sentence is a thrilling thing and one of the glories of the English language. An incomplete one is suspense. A broken sentence is a flat tire on the road to truth. [with a bow to Gertrude Stein]
Drama is the literature of spatial relationships.
Dramatic movement is centered on revelation growing out of conflict.
Genius consists of knowing when to stop.
Genius is easy access to the subconscious.
If we understood the enigma of life, there would be no need for the arts.
Put your characters in an impossible situation and let them work it out.
When a system deprives its creative people from realizing their creativity, the system is in error. Those who are deprived of their full realization do not suffer because creative people have a rich interior life. They are the soul of a system, and it is the system's loss, not theirs because the system has lost its soul.
The business of art is to infiltrate and subvert the establishment.
Artists must make their art their first language.
THEATRE, ACTING, AND DIRECTING
The glory of theatre is its imperfection and humanity; its grandeur is our striving to attain perfection through our humanity and never attaining it. If we ever attain that impossibility, then we will be superfluous.
Great acting is joyous precision.
If the acting is good, you don't notice it.
Style is dependent on the depth of characterization.
An actor must play an audience like a good angler.
If acting is good, you don't notice it.
An acceptable production of a great play is not enough.
Directing is taking several individual egos and fusing them into a collective, functioning ego. [with Linda]
Acting is precision and within that precision is creativity, nuance, and subtle invention.
Acting is knowing what you are doing and letting it happen.
Rehearsals should be designed to create a condition where creativity can happen.
You can teach competency, but you can't teach genius. Genius happens, and it emerges if it finds itself. Then it's unstoppable. How do you uncork the bottle? That's the key to good teaching.
Serious acting is "being"; acting in musicals is showing off.
A floor plan should not be too easy. A director needs obstacles, difficulties. Any conflict, any tension you can put on a stage intensifies the theatrical experience and heightens the drama.
Rehearsals create conditioned responses within which creativity can happen.
It is the role of the director to take a number of egos on stage and make it into one stage ego. [Linda]
Stage fright is a sudden seizure of adolescent insecurity.
Actors live and die with the props they are given.
Never make a moral judgment on a character. (Bertolt Brecht disagrees with this, Stanislavsky never understood this, and Artaud made this a scriptural text.)
Style is making an audience believe in the time and place of the play.
Technique is letting an audience see the action while not letting them know it is being shown to them.
Technique is letting the audience see, hear, understand, and believe what is happening on stage
Good blocking directs the viewers’ eyes to the center of a play’s action. Great blocking reveals human relationships with space and movement.
The glory of theatre is its imperfection and humanity; its grandeur is our striving to attain perfection while never attaining it. If we ever attain that impossibility, then we as artists will be superfluous.
A floor plan should not be too easy. A director needs obstacles, difficulties. Any conflict, any tension you can put on a stage intensifies the theatrical experience and heightens the drama.
An acceptable production of a great play is not enough.
OTHER PEOPLE’S EPIGRAMS
I collected the following over many years. Many have not made it to “Bartlett,” some have. All have stimulated and even formed my attitudes and thinking processes. I have not quoted George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde very often. They would have overwhelmed what I have selected. I urge you to read their works. The biggest collection of Shavian observations can be found in the supplementary materials attached to his great play, Man and Superman. Wilde’s observations are scattered through his relatively small body of work.
Here are a few for starters. Others will be added from time to time.
POLITICS
War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.
Ambrose Bierce
An eye for an eye will make the world blind.
Ghandi
To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
Republican President Theodore Roosevelt (1918). (What would Teddy say now?)
A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt...
If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.
Thomas Jefferson, after the passage of the Sedition Act in 1798
If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law.
Justice Louis Brandeis
This is the patent age of new inventions
For killing bodies, and for saving souls,
All propagated with the best intentions.
Lord Byron
In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.
John Adams
Democracy is the worst system of government devised, except all the others.
Winston Churchill
The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.
Henry A. Wallace, then Vice-President of the USA
I’ve always believed that America’s government was a unique political system — one designed by geniuses so that it could be run by idiots.
Thomas L. Friedman
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
Ghandi
All classes are criminal. We live in an age of equality.
Joe Orton
The earth has enough for every person’s need, but not enough for every person’s greed.
Ghandi
LIFE AND THE MEANING OF IT ALL
The only thing worse than no gesture is an empty gesture.
Linda Robbins Coleman
Life is an appearance on a balcony, and then the shutters close.
Marcello Mastroianni
In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
Sir Paul McCartney, "The End"
I find that I can live with the pain, after all. The pain, now, is part of the happiness, then. That's the deal.
C. S. Lewis
Being conscious is the only thing you’ve got.
Samuel Beckett
In actual combat, dying is a lot easier than living.
Survivor of the Battle of the Bulge
We've reached the age when we're happy if our friends make it through lunch.
Noel Coward
You can observe a lot by watching.
Yoga Berra
Any man who thinks he can read the mind of a woman knows nothing.
Robert Evans
There's three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth; and no one's lying.
Robert Evans
We run faster and faster, hoping someday to catch up with the past which we have irretrievably lost.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Life is what happens while your are making other plans.
John Lennon
It's an old battle between those of us who use a toothbrush and those who do not.
Lady Gregory
Ancient tragedy puts the question: "How are we to live?” Modern tragedy asks: "How am I going to live?"
Kenneth Tynan
A man's life does not really belong to himself. It belongs to his sons and his daughters, to the rain and the stars, to the voices of the past that live in a man's heart, to God.
Sam Peckinpah
When you try harder, you perform less.
Old baseball saying
A planned life is a dead one.
Lauren Bacall
Life is a journey, and it's always most exciting when you don't know where you're going.
George Stevens
Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.
Margaret Mead
Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents."
Margaret Mead
The older I get, the better I used to be.
Lee Trevino
Two is too little. Four is too much.
Aristotle
Never kick a cow chip on a hot day.
Will Rogers
Always drink upstream of the herd.
Will Rogers
Don't take any shit.
Quincy Jones (speaking at the UCLA commencement ceremonies)
COSMIC CONCERNS
A lie disturbs the universe.
St. Augustine
Man is certainly stark mad. He cannot even make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by the dozen.
Montaigne
Real joy is a serious business.
Felix Mendelssohn
God is love, but get it in ink.
Gypsy Rose Lee
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser, “The Speed of Darkness”
The end is nothing, the road is all.
Willa Cather
What has posterity ever done for me?
Tom Stoppard
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth — more than ruin—more even than death. ... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
Bertrand Russell
No matter where you go, there you are.
Buckeroo Banzai
RELIGION
If Christ came back, he wouldn't be a Christian.
Mark Twain
And lo! The Beast looked upon the face of Beauty, and it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as one dead.
Merian C. Cooper's fake Arabian proverb used in King Kong
WRITING AND ART
There is only one God, and the artist is his critic.
Willa Cather
It is not work to me. I love writing. I have never understood this business of being lonely at the typewriter or computer. I'm sitting in a room with fascinating people, and I hope they're fascinating to an audience. I enjoy doing it. It's a big part of my life.
Arthur Laurents
No one goes around messing with composers' work the way they do with plays. That's probably where I learned to not put up with that junk. Nobody takes three or four measures out a Bach fugue.
Edward Albee
If you spend 100 bucks going to the theatre, something should happen to you.
Edward Albee
The western is the simplest form - drama, a gun, death.
Howard Hawks
Did you ever hear of an unemployed audience?
Orson Welles
The dirtiest book in the world is the expurgated one.
Walt Whitman
Censorship is advertising paid for by the government.
Federico Fellini
Work's more fun than fun.
Noel Coward
...in the theatre of the mind, nothing disappoints.
Ralph G. Allen
The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose - and is a test of the quality of a nation's civilization.
John F. Kennedy
It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
Tom Stoppard
A play is fiction and fiction is fact distilled into truth.
Edward Albee
No drama is complete until it has been witnessed by an audience.
Federico Fellini
A computer is useless. It can only give you answers.
Pablo Picasso
Act One: Get your hero up a tree.
Act Two: Throw rocks at him.
Act Three: Get him down.
George Abbott re playwriting
There's the story of the starlet who's so dumb she sleeps with the writer.
David Storey
Analyzing comedy is like dissecting a frog. It's an interesting process, but ultimately what you end up with is a dead frog.
Robert Benchley
If you don't get the clothes off fast and the gun out quick, you're in trouble.
Sydney Pollack
A writer is working when he's staring out of the window.
Burton Roscoe
One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.
Carl Sagan
Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
Be a bourgeoisie in your life so you can be a madman in your art.
Flaubert
Never use two words when you can use one. Never use a two syllable word when you can use a one syllable word.
Ted Sorenson to John F. Kennedy
The screenplay is to the book as the bouillon cube is to the ox.
Elmore Leonard
LANGUAGE
When I want my men to remember something important, to really make it stick, I give it to them double dirty. It may not sound nice to some bunch of little old ladies at an afternoon tea party, but it helps my soldiers to remember. You can't run an army without profanity; and it has to be eloquent profanity. An army without profanity couldn't fight it's way out of a piss-soaked paper bag.
General George Patton
As for the types of comments I make, sometimes I just, By God, get carried away with my own eloquence.
General George Patton
The worst thing to be said about us Americans is that we sell our souls for a giggle.
Norman Mailer
You can say pretty much what you want to say about a man as long as you say he’s good in bed.
Evelyn Waugh
The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.
Henry A. Wallace, then Vice-President of the USA
The only true paradise is the one we lost.
Marcel Proust
Artists are paid to dance on the edge of the cliff, and the closer you dance to the edge, the more you get paid.
Sam Peckinpah
He digs in your brain with a scalpel.
L.Q. Jones re Sam Peckinpah
Surely we're all mad people, and they whom we think are, are not.
Tournier's Revenger's Tragedy
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination, but the combination is locked up in the safe.
Peter de Vries
A bean counter should never be in charge of a dream.
Nikki Giovanni, poet
You can do only two things in Hollywood: You can lie in the sand and look at the stars, or you can lie on the stars and look at the sand.
Enrique Jardial Poncela, Spanish playwright
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason
Most humor is buried in anger.
Nathan Lane
There are no second acts in American lives.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
ADVICE TO ACTORS
If you don't listen to the audience, you're dead. They react, and you use that and go with it.
Christopher Plummer
A star is a self-contained mass of gas.
Dictionary meaning.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers, and divines.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Luck is the residue of design.
Branch Rickey
It's play. It's play. Don't forget it's a play. It's awful when it gets labored. Play like children. Children have the best time. They make fun of us. They say actors are children. They should live so long.
Alan Alda
Playwrights work in solitude, then expose the work of their solitude in an indecently public manner.
Simon Gray
Wisdom is to call all things by their right names.
Old Chinese proverb
Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit.
There has not been any great talent without an element of madness.
Seneca