Archive: January 2010

Mica M. Tumaric comes from the anarchic, acerbic, antic aphoristic alembic that is the Balkans. Born in Novi Sad in 1949, he is a journalist by profession and, like most of his fellow Serbian aphorists, a satirist by vocation. His work has been translated into English, Russian, Hungarian, Romanian, Ruthenian, Slovak, Macedonian and Bulgarian, among other languages.

If you had to pay for stupidity, many would go bankrupt.

After all the doors opened, we were left with a draft.

The hungry have had their fill of promises.

He’s in great shape; he keeps running from the truth.

We struggled to gain freedom of speech; now we can’t get a word in edgewise.

Patricie Hole?ková is a Czech aphorist. Born in Slovakia, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kracow and has lived in the Czech Republic since 1982. Her aphorisms first appeared in the Czech anthology A Good Word Never Cuts to The Quick (2004). Her first collection, Aphorisms (Oftis), was published in 2005 and this year a new collection, Without Many Words, is due out. For more aphorisms, go to Patricie Hole?ková’s website.

I prefer the living thoughts of the dead as opposed to the dead thoughts of the living.

He who doesn’t have ideals idealizes whatever he has.

Some people have so much self-confidence that they can’t even be flattered.

We flatter ourselves the most when we say that we value sincerity more than flattery

Those who don’t pretend they’re smarter think they’re smarter.

A big mistake is to overlook the small one.

Only in disappointment do we realize how big our hopes were.

Young people have illusions about the future, old people about the past.

Jim Finnegan, proprietor of the ursprache blog, has done it again. He’s found yet another obscure yet fascinating aphorist, as he explains here:

“At a church book sale, I found a lovely little book—Bits of Philosophy: From The Letters and Journal of Anna Firth Ferguson (Concord, Mass.,1933)—written by a woman who lived much like Thoreau at Walden Pond; simply, close to nature, and with a similar urge to compose aphoristic and philosophic writings. From three short accounts of her life and ways, written by her friends in what looks to be a posthumously and privately printed book, I’m given to understand that Anna Fitch studied art in Boston, but early on left both Boston and the formal study of art. She had a cottage built near Concord, Mass, and there she gardened, raised vegetables and wrote. In 1902, she was married to Edwin Ferguson, a man of ‘delicate health’. Mr. Ferguson was a cleric, and after marrying they lived for a time in Washington state where he served a parish. However, after a short period in what was rugged country at the time, Edwin and Anna were forced by reason of his health to move to Colorado. There she bore a son. But in only the fourth year of their marriage, Edwin passed away, and Anna returned to Concord to live with her son in her cottage. In that cottage, which came to be called “Peace Cottage,” she spent the remainder of her life. A selection of the aphorisms:”

We give by being. One cannot give much until he becomes much.

One cannot take mental pictures of another without giving us a view of himself.

A condition for interchange is inter-need.

It is more difficult to live poetry than to write it.

We cannot find peace by building a floor over unanswered questions and living upon it.

A good moment appreciated comes again.

Better than a teacher is a desire to learn.

The first step towards knowing a thing is not knowing it.

We have left much rubbish at the door of truth, but none has got inside.

Daniel Liebert (see pp. 292–293 of Geary’s Guide) is back with some new aphorisms. But not just any aphorisms; these are his own take on Ramon Gomez de la Serna’s greguerias. “As far as I’ve been able to ascertain,” Dan writes, “I am the world’s only writer of greguerias.” Dan defines greguerias as combining “aphoristic assertiveness, the punchline ‘kick’ of a one-liner joke, and the child-like delight in metaphor.” These and other of Liebert’s aphorisms are forthcoming in Fraglit, edited by Olivia Dresher.

Radio static is the lint of sound.

The high-diver pauses a moment to wind the spring in his buttocks.

A nun’s wimple is a bandage where her face was scissored from life.

Life evaporates and leaves memory salt.

Moths are shadows breaded with dust.

My morning piss hoses down the boulevards of sleep.

A stopped clock has arrived.

Lipstick on my cheek is the passport stamp at the border of Family.