Take my advice, dear reader, don’t talk epigrams even if you have the gift. I know, to those have, the temptation is almost irresistible. But resist it. Epigram and truth are rarely commensurate. Truth has to be somewhat chiselled, as it were, before it will quite fit into an epigram. – Joseph Farrell, “About Conversation,” The Lectures of a Certain Professor, 1877

And in spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations. – George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Daniel Deronda (Book II, Meeting Streams), 1876