(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.
Parable
Definition:
(a.) Procurable.
(n.) A comparison; a similitude; specifically, a short fictitious narrative of something which might really occur in life or nature, by means of which a moral is drawn; as, the parables of Christ.
(v. t.) To represent by parable.
Example Sentences:
(1) IIRR has also used humorous anecdotes and parables as educational devices.
(2) So also do parables drawn from actual cases and used as personalized narrative projective tests.
(3) With a back catalogue including Mexican road movie Y Tu Mama Tambien, dystopian near-future parable Children of Men and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Cuarón has been nominated for Oscars before, but not in this category.
(4) While he gets his beard trimmed – a painstaking process that takes 45 minutes and involves an Afro comb the size of a garden rake – Rick dishes out a little parable about how to deal with paparazzi in light of Alec Baldwin's recent decision to quit public life (and New York) after one too many run-ins.
(5) Stories are not only a matter of plots, or of conclusions or denouements, any more than they are moral lessons or parables in fancy dress.
(6) And yet the reason the judges gave the prize to Catton, rather than to either of the two other serious contenders – Jim Crace's parable of land and dispossession, or Colm Tóibín's spare, shocking portrait of the Virgin Mary – must be for its investigation into what a novel is, and can be.
(7) The logic of the specific-effects approach to treatment evaluation is first illustrated by a hypothetical example (the Minefield Parable), and it is then suggested that the approach is appropriate for the evaluation of any treatment, be it physical, psychological, or some complex combination.
(8) The parable of the frog and tadpoles ridiculed the false hopes that encourage the acceptance of inequality.
(9) The expansive, leisurely poems in the new collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück, are interspersed with one-paragraph prose-poems – miniature parables often framed as personal anecdotes, like this week's choice, A Work of Fiction.
(10) Chelsea's shafting of Ranieri is the most brazen parable of everything that is vile in modern football.
(11) And what's happening to reefs is a parable of what is going to happen to everything else."
(12) Asked what he expected of the papal visit to Britain in 1982, he told the following parable.
(13) With the Falklands war sending Thatcher back into power in 1983, followed swiftly by the defeat of the miners' strike, there was a general sense on the British theatrical left that now was the time to "get real" - to oppose the Thatcher regime with more directly relevant drama than the parables of injustice in which Bond seemed to be dealing.
(14) On Renaissance, you'll find politics, war parables, mellifluous metaphors, a keen sense of humour and a brilliant backdrop of Tribe-ish beats by himself and the deceased J Dilla.
(15) It certainly doesn't demand to be read as a parable of the victimisation of women by medical patriarchs."
(16) now treat these horrors as parables or myths, which is just as well.
(17) Indeed, from what's emerged so far, the story of Madonna and the unbuilt school has all the elements of a modern parable about the failure of top-down development projects.
(18) In the parable, the inventor of writing – the Egyptian god Theuth – boasts to King Thamus that his innovation would make people wiser and improve their memories.
(19) There is another paradox in the fact that Plato put the parable in the mouth of the last great Greek oral philosopher, whose ideas he had chosen to put down in writing.
(20) The first film is a tender gay parable in which Luke falls in love with Alec Guinness and gradually "comes out" as a Jedi.