Sentence examples for epigram from inspiring English sources

We were at the dark heart of what Oliver was later to call "the locust years" (he loved a good epigram) when the forestry sector was trashing native woodland, and the subtext of the conference was a subtly orchestrated counter-attack by British ecologists, a bid to rehabilitate the national tree.

The epigram to "Fear and Loathing" quoted Dr Johnson: "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man".

THERE is a saying in the transport business that if it flies or floats, you should rent it (there are also much ruder versions of this epigram).

But the quest for cash ends up adding corruption to the CIA's original sin of duplicity and the incineration sets off a cycle of revenge that consumes everyone it touches or, as John Milton put it in a couplet that forms the epigram to this gripping novel, "revenge, at first thought sweet/Bitter ere long back on itself recoils".

The Duke of Wellington never uttered the epigram attributed to him: "Next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained".

The author quotes supportively from an epigram by Joy Williams: that it is not helpful to "save the whale and screw the shrimp".

Saki's epigram, from "Reginald on Besetting Sins", has lasted well, but when it was published in 1904, readers would have felt not just its wit but its bite.

An epigram on his superior, the Greek Hadrianus, Deprecatio ad Hadrianum, jeopardized his civil post; but, by assiduously praising Stilicho, minister of the Western emperor Flavius Honorius, and denouncing his rivals at the court of Flavius Arcadius, he gained the position of tribunus et notarius, the rank of vir clarissimus, and the honour of a statue.

Practitioner of a wide range of forms including the medieval fixed forms of the ballade and the rondeau, chansons, blasons (poems employing descriptive details to praise or to satirize), and elegies Marot preferred the epistle for its freedom of style and the epigram for its vivacity.

But for a while he spoke only in lapidary epigrams.

Nor was he a China bore: he was as happy discussing Cervantes, sailing or the life of Napoleon as he was pondering the epigrams of Confucius (whose "Analects" he translated in 1997).