Nick Piombino is a poet, essayist, psychotherapist, and aphorist. In Contradicta: Aphorisms, he has written sayings that “replicate some aspects of psychoanalysis in which two individual viewpoints are juxtaposed, working together to achieve understanding and insight.” Aphorisms themselves can be considered a kind of reading cure, if not exactly a talking one. Reading a good aphorism is a mini-psychotherapeutic session, in which the aphorism asks you often uncomfortable questions and you have to come up with the answers. Not something to take lying down, but definitely something to make you sit up and look around with a new perspective. The brief selection of aphorisms below is culled from Piombino’s blog; he also tweets. My thanks, as usual, to Jim Finnegan, proprietor of the always enlightening ursprache blog as well as the aphoristically amazing Tramp Freighter, for alerting me to Nick Piombino’s aphorisms.

Even time stops for a moment, to bow, astonished, to real happiness.

The best winners learn much when they lose, the great discoverers are challenged when lost, to know having is to feel deeply when bereft.

If memory is the cake, nostalgia is the icing, the icing that no one can resist licking off their fingers.

Success consists of 1% holding forth and 99% holding back.