have been very popular going back to ancient Greek and Chinese times. Oscar Wilde is probably still best-remembered for his epigrams (some which have been quoted here before). Basically, aphorisms and epigrams are often quoted because of their brevity, delight, truth, and wisdom.
“Action is eloquence.” –William Shakespeare
“I am a verb.” –Ulysses S. Grant
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” –George Orwell
“Big Brother is watching you.” –George Orwell
“The body says what words cannot.” –Martha Graham
“We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.” –Bill Bryson
“Imitation lies at the root of most human actions.” –Anatole France
“Curiosity is the thirst of the soul.” –Samuel Johnson
“In every parting is an image of death.” –George Eliot
“Illness is the night-side of life.” –Susan Sontag
“I now begin a journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life.” –Ronald Reagan
“I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.” –Aldous Huxley
“The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.” –Pablo Picasso
“Good fences make good neighbors.” –Robert Frost
“Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“There is no sin except stupidity.” –Oscar Wilde
“What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.” –John Keats
“Cynicism is an unpleasant way of speaking the truth.” –Lillian Hellman
“Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” –Willa Cather
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” –George Santayana
“Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.” –Stephen Leacock
“You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.” –Norman Douglas
“Let the punishment fit the crime.” –W.S. Gilbert
“Every man’s own reason must be his oracle.”–Thomas Jefferson
“For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.'” –John Greenleaf Whittier
“All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” –Dante
“Sleep is the twin of death.’ –Homer
“Animals are such agreeable friends–they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.” –George Eliot
“Better to accept whatever happens.” –Horace
“It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees!” –Dolores Ibarruri
“Trust, like the soul, never returns once it is gone. –Publilius Syrus
“We’re all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!” –Tennessee Williams
“O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!” –John Keats
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.” –William Shakespeare
“Ships that pass in the night, and speak to each other in passing.” –William Wordsworth
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” –Arthur C. Clarke
“Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.” –William Congreve
“Speech is a mirror of the soul, as a man speaks so he is” –Publilicus Syrus
“In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.” –Russell Baker
“Opportunity makes a thief.” –Francis Bacon
“A library is thought in cold storage.” –Lord Samuel
“Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.” –Robert Louis Stevenson
“A sudden, bold and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man and lay him open.” –Francis Bacon
“Men of few words are the best men.” –William Shakespeare
“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence ends.”–Henry Adams
“The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.” –B.F. Skinner
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” –William Shakespeare
“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.” —The Bible
“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.” –Hector Berlioz
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” –William Shakespeare
“I used to be Snow White…but I drifted.” –Mae West
“The Spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”–The Bible
“Brevity is the soul of wit.’ –William Shakespeare
“The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.” –James Thurber
“Writing when properly managed…is but a different name for conversation.” –Laurence Sterne