An epigram is a gag that’s played Carnegie Hall. – Oscar Levant (Thanks, Garson O’Toole of quoteinvestigator.com!)

Dr. [Richard] Bentley’s son reading a novel, the Doctor said, “Why read a book which you cannot quote?” – Walpoliana (Horace Walpole, John Pinkerton), “Useless Reading,” January 1800

[T]here are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion. – Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift, 1963, translated from Russian by Michael Scammell

How many of us have been first attracted to reason, first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism from Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere. – Edward Lytton Bulwer