| The gnomic poets and the Seven Sages had crystallized morality in apothegms. |
| Prose romances were rewritten as plays, old plays were rewritten as new, classical texts were translated, adapted, and plundered for moral sententiae, apothegms, and imagery. |
| These apothegms are, all of them, the stuff of professional politics. |
| You belong where the witty apothegms of Lords, the silly moralities of matrons, the blinding high of opium, and the beauty of visual arts mingle to form one convoluted world. |
