Archive: April 2026

“Nothing makes life more complicated than taking the easy way out,” Andrzej Majewski writes in Wisdom for Every Occasion. But in his collection of aphorisms, Majewski, organizer of last year’s International Aphorism Conference in Wroclaw, Poland, provides no easy answers, just plenty of complicated aphorisms for complicated times. Working within the grand tradition of the 17th- to 19th-century French moralists, with a distinctively Central European sardonic twist, Majewski’s aphorisms offer wry, apt, refreshingly uneasy takes on politics, society and everything in between. A selection …

An aphorist—a person with little to say.

Children need love most when they deserve it least.

The poor always fight the wars of the rich.

Remember: when you bow your head you make it easier for the executioner.

Never hire the best lawyer; the worst judge will be cheaper.

Freedom is like a windowpane—almost invisible until someone shatters it.

Karl Kraus called his aphorisms “prejudices,” “illusions,” or “splinters”; Antonio Porchia, “voices”; Stanisław Jerzy Lec, “trifles”. Colombian aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila designated his sayings escolios, or “glosses,” after the ancient practice of penning notes and commentaries in the margins of other books, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna came up with greguerías.

Gómez de la Serna defined greguerías as “merely fatal exclamations of things and of the soul, upon bumping into one another by pure chance.” These meetings introduce two unlikely things to each other, whose interplay then produces weird and wonderful imagery:

Tombs should be made with periscopes.

Gómez de la Serna even devised the formula by which these peculiar sayings were created: humor + metaphor = greguería. Though the images are exotic, the metaphors are relentlessly pedestrian and the comedy is brilliantly observational, revealing little existential dilemmas in seemingly commonplace encounters:

After helping a blind man across the road, we remain slightly undecided

or teasing out psychological insights from unguarded moments:

What most reveals a man’s character is the face he makes when his match goes out on him.

Montenegran aphorist, poet, and anthologist Darko Batan Žunjić has taken up the form in a way that honors Gómez de la Serna’s oddball observations and whimsical juxtapositions. Žunjić is the author of three poetry collections (Nit, Čarolija nedostatka, and Lepršave latice, the latter a collection of haiku) and two collections of aphorisms (Sve po zakonu and Ringišpil maski). A selection of his greguerías …

A shutter is the eyelid with which one building winks at another.

A book is a warehouse of tiny letters.

A saxophone is a pipe that sings.

Sand is the skin of the beach.

A shadow is the hand of a sundial.