(n.) A comprehensive maxim or principle expressed in a few words; a sharply defined sentence relating to abstract truth rather than to practical matters.
Example Sentences:
(1) For the man who created the " specialist in failure " aphorism to disparage a fellow manager, it is obvious how much that would hurt.
(2) His most celebrated aphorism was his response to a journalist who wondered whether Christian Democrats would ever be weary of wielding power: "Political power wears out only those who haven't got it."
(3) She is thinking about a book of aphorisms, for which Spark characters such as Mrs Hawkins and Miss Jean Brodie are famous.
(4) His aphorisms include the following: "may your food be your medicine".
(5) When we sit down for a more formal interview in his Manhattan hotel room a few hours later, Ross's earlier gregarious anecdotes are replaced by aphorisms that could come straight off one of those inspirational posters you see in recruitment consultant offices.
(6) I just thought up a nonsensical Confucian-sounding aphorism and said it in a grossly exaggerated version of my dad's voice.
(7) Greg Dyke must put plug in Qatar talk if Fifa revamp is to unite the world | Barney Ronay Read more Like Blatter, Dyke can lapse into mystifyingly abstract aphorisms.
(8) One cheering side-effect of economic depression, is that it provides occasion to recall Keynes's sideline in Wildean aphorisms.
(9) Vidal's critics disparaged his tendency to formulate an aphorism rather than to argue, finding in his work an underlying note of contempt for those who did not agree with him.
(10) It's an aphorism the ex-head of the civil service proved wrong.
(11) Much of that is down to Dupuis who, in a genre where bland aphorisms are often the norm, actually has something to say.
(12) Twain was always a barometric writer, with a knack for registering contemporary social pressures in sharp-eyed aphorisms that weren't merely quotable, but often well ahead of their time.
(13) The old aphorism is still valid: When in doubt, take it out.
(14) Which in turn helps partially to explain the significance of the aphorism: 'An Argentine is an Italian who speaks Spanish and thinks he is an Englishman.'
(15) Now they are the stalest of cliches, but when, in the first 1998 episode, in the midst of all that big hair and weird brown lipstick, you hear Carrie first describe the allure and disappointment of "toxic bachelors", when Samantha first says frankly that she likes to have sex without emotion, to "fuck like a man", it was bitingly fresh for women to speak these aphorisms out loud, in public, and in fabulous heels.
(16) Elizabeth is prone to blurting out aphorisms, such as "it's easier to give a blow job than make coffee" and "you should be just as happy with the breasts you have as you are with the futility of existence".
(17) In its submission to the special session, Colombia quotes Albert Einstein’s aphorism that the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”.
(18) Aphorisms often appear too trite to tell us anything meaningful, yet this is not the case with the assertion attributed to Mahatma Gandhi that "the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members".
(19) The files disclose that Thatcher's first months in power reveal a torrent of pungent political aphorisms that were to sustain her in power for the next 13 years.
(20) It was a favourite Reagan aphorism, sometimes half-true, sometimes a disastrous basis for policy in a globally connected, ever more sophisticated world.
Axiom
Definition:
(a.) A self-evident and necessary truth, or a proposition whose truth is so evident as first sight that no reasoning or demonstration can make it plainer; a proposition which it is necessary to take for granted; as, "The whole is greater than a part;" "A thing can not, at the same time, be and not be."
(a.) An established principle in some art or science, which, though not a necessary truth, is universally received; as, the axioms of political economy.
Example Sentences:
(1) Pair comparisons enable a (partial) test of the axioms of additive conjoint measurement.
(2) The clinician has to deal with scientific and ethical issues and keep in mind the axiom 'Primum no nocere--Above all, do no harm.'
(3) Proponents of two axioms of biological evolutionary theory have attempted to find justification by reference to nonequilibrium thermodynamics.
(4) Fundamental animal studies by pioneers, such as Chang, Thibault and Edwards, taught us nature's axioms for gametogenesis, fertilization, development and differentiation.
(5) Emerson approvingly quoted Swedenborg's, "The visible world and the relation of its parts, is the dial plate of the invisible", and asserted, "The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics."
(6) One of the essential axioms of modern politics has always been that voters dislike divided parties and will punish them at the polls.
(7) Stereology is the application of mathematical axioms and allows one to quantitate three-dimensional structures from the measurement of two-dimensional cross sections thereof.
(8) Synthesis of information in the brain is determined by the same principles, but extremums of the thermo-dynamic potential (their analogues in logic) are based on an arbitrary system of axioms.
(9) The axioms of treatment are to remove all pressure, debride necrotic tissue, keep the ulcer clean, and prevent further injury.
(10) USCI, DLP, or Axiom cannulas can be inserted femorally.
(11) Flash fire victims are exceptions to the axiom that elevation of blood carboxyhemoglobin is a sine qua non for concluding that a decedent recovered from the scene of a conflagration was alive in the fire.
(12) Examples are the systematic studies by Denis Burkitt, who through perseverance unraveled the lymphoma that now bears his name, and the thought-provoking description of the immunoproliferative small intestinal disease carried out by the Cape Town group, with both illustrating the axiom that "the study of man is man."
(13) It is thus denied axiomatic status, and the effects of natural selection are subsumed as an additional level of constraint in an evolutionary theory derived from the Axiom of Historically Determined Inherent Directionality.
(14) The first, the Axiom of Improbability, is shown to be nonhistorical and thus, for a theory of change through time, acausal.
(15) Nursing research, as every other research studying human beings, must be guided, attuned and illuminated by ethical principles and axioms.
(16) In this review, a few well-established axioms have been challenged while others were viewed from a new perspective.
(17) An axiom of Thomas Hobbes states that "people are never more helpless than when the force meant to protect their rights turns against them."
(18) The basis for the development for a dynamic compression implant (DCI) is the axiome of the mechanically induced bone reaction.
(19) This article reexamines the Sidman stimulus equivalence analogy in the context of a broader consideration of the mathematical axiom than was included in the original presentation of the analogy and some of the data that have accumulated in the interim.
(20) This is in contradistinction to earlier work on decision making for patients with laryngeal cancer, and most of the work in medical decision making in general, in which underlying axioms have almost never been tested.