The word "apophthegm" is correct and usable in written English.
It is a noun that refers to a short, pithy, and memorable saying or phrase, such as a proverb or a wise saying. For example, "Actions speak louder than words" is an apophthegm.
They have been called stories but could equally be miniatures, anecdotes, essays, jokes, parables, fables, texts, aphorisms or even apophthegms, prayers or simply observations".
Mainly, though, Wayne and I share the knowledge that, for all the medical commentators' apophthegms, the cure for a broken metatarsal, as for a broken heart, is time.
Aphorisms, or even apophthegms?
Clearly, Rilke is sorting out his own thoughts on the hoof as much as he is delivering apophthegms ex cathedra.
Photograph: Eamonn McCabe Throughout his career, Will Self has been accused of what one poster here has referred to as "showy referentiality", with frequent allusions to Stendhal, De Quincey, Wilde and Burroughs couched in a language filled with "apophthegms" and "rodomontades" that have on occasion threatened to overshadow the content of his work.
The Prince – his self-help manual on how to get power and how to keep it – may be 500 years old but its neat apophthegms (that, among other things, it's better to be feared than loved, that it pays to have your deputy beat your enemies to death) have worked their way into every sphere of modern life from politics and culture to global business.
But philosophers can be dry and their apophthegms a little prescriptive.
Some readers may also have a problem with the whiff of homophobia in the depictions of the Eighties gay scene; others may just retch at the characteristic semantic overload - maculate credenzas are swamped by anfractuous apophthegms amid prognathous rodomontade.
For Theano, the most famous Pythagorean woman (see 3.3 above), one fragment of a work On Piety is preserved as well as the titles of several other works, numerous apophthegms and a number of letters.
Fast-shifting animation also provided an impetus for Mr. Zorn's "Apophthegms," an extended sequence of finely honed miniatures that cumulatively suggested a soundtrack for an unseen cartoon.
