Author: James Geary

John Lyly was born in Kent in 1553 or 1554. He was a student of Magdalen College, Oxford and in 1579 published Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit, which became one of the very first bestsellers. Euphues is the story of the eponymous hero as he falls in love, betrays his friend to win the girl, then loses the girl to another man, all the while discoursing in high Renaissance style of the relationship between wit and wisdom. The book introduced the literary fad of euphuism (not to be confused with euphemism), the ornate, embellished, verbose style pioneered by Lyly. An euphuism is typically overly-long but also strangely beautiful. If you took a page of euphuistic prose, brought it to a low boil, and let it simmer overnight, you would wake up with an aphorism.Lyly did just that, as these aphorism from Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit attest:

Things of greatest profit are set forth with least price.

Envy braggeth but draweth no blood, the malicious have more mind to grip than might to cut.

In all perfect shapes a blemish bringeth rather a liking every way to the eyes than a loathing any way to the mind.

That wit is the better if it be the dearer bought.

Is not he accounted most wise whom other men’s harms do make most wary?

A fine wit, a sharp sense, a quick understanding, is able to attain to more in a moment or a very little space than a dull and blockish head in a month.

As the sea-crab swimmeth always against the stream, so wit always striveth against wisdom; and as the bee is oftentimes hurt with her own honey, so is wit not seldom plagued with his own conceit.

The vine water with wine is soon withered … yea, man the more witty he is the less happy he is.

The blind man doth eat many a fly.

They commonly are soonest believed that are best loved, and they liked best whom we have known longest.

Sloth turneth the edge of wit, study sharpeneth the mind; a thing be it ever so easy is hard to the idle, a thing be it never so hard is easy to the wit well employed.

Ma Changshan lives in Beijing and has been writing aphorisms for more than 20 years. It all started in 1990 when he read Mark Twain’s saying, “If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.” “I was shocked by his paradox,” Ma Changshan says. “That’s when I began to write aphorisms, never stopping. My ambition is to publish 10,000 aphorisms. Hopefully, the 10,000 aphorisms will be finished in 2012.” Ma Changshan’s comments on his audience will not doubt sound familiar to fellow aphorists: “Some Chinese reader understand me, but only a few.”

A great man is one who moves slowly but resolutely and with whom the masses must run to keep up.

Conservatives are a group of people with noble virtues: They leave to others the fun of blazing new paths and leave to themselves the drudgery of passing judgment on the effort.

Human society is organized such that seldom is there a position occupied by one who best suits that position.

Opportunism may yield instant gratification; altruism leads to eternal happiness.

The perfect man is said to have only virtues but not shortcomings. It may be deduced from this that the perfect man is not a complete man.

Those who have suffered know what suffering is like. Those who haven’t can only imagine what suffering is like. Suffering for the latter is more boundless.

Embrace your enemy; this allows you to launch a sneak attack on him.

(English translations by Xiang Hua）

Happiness is everywhere but still in short supply.

I will never join in a chorus, especially the one that has a conductor.

I would rather be seen from below by the public; that way they will never realize I am bald.

(English translations by Feng Tong)

Marty Rubin is back with some characteristically poignant, Zen-inflected aphorisms. I’ve blogged about Marty’s aphorisms before (click here to read that post) and for more of Marty’s musings, check out his blog: Out Of Context: Pieces of a Life.

No one can think clearly who thinks only with their head.

The moon is always full, though you can’t always see it.

Rain or shine, the cicadas find something to sing about.

When you win an argument, what do you win?

The world makes sense to those who don’t try to make sense of it.

Not trying makes everything easy.

Christopher Phelps describes himself as “a fledgling poet,” but in these aphorisms he is certainly in full flight. These sayings, which Phelps calls epigrams, play off stock phrases as they slyly subvert and elevate contemporary bumper sticker mentality. “Occasionally in my work I notice that an epigram says more than a longer, more landscaped poem would,” he writes—and he’s right. Enough said.

Is necessity a single mom, or does invention have a dad?

Tides aside, it is also the tears of the boaters that raise their boats.

A poem is, if divinely inspired, humanly proportioned. A poem is spirit and letter sitting together in talks. A poem is graven imagination. A poem is sacrilegible.

In a world of paraphrase—a slope that slips from one end to its opposite—a poem is what remains of the exact quotation.

Outside the box there is a glut of slain dragon, pushing down the price of dragon meat for the rest of us.

“Don’t believe everything you think” is a paraphrase of Aristotle. Bumper stickers: check and source yourselves.

To paraphrase Simone Weil, we all partake of the same hell, but hell pretends we suffer separately. That’s hell’s lie.

To the soul? I don’t know. But our eyes are windows. For the glass to glow, you have to wash the words out.

Great piece in the NY Times by Brian Morton, Falser Words Were Never Spoken, about why the true function of aphorisms is to make you feel NOT good about yourself, not to reassure you that everything will be alright. Aphorisms are irritants, not salves; in (metaphorical) media terms, they are ‘lean forward’ rather than ‘lean back’ experiences. “When you start to become aware of these bogus quotations, you can’t stop finding them,” Morton writes. “Henry James, George Eliot, Picasso — all of them are being kept alive in popular culture through pithy, cheery sayings they never actually said.” Inspect your coffee mugs today! Dispose of those that don’t unsettle you, as you would expired medicines discovered in a bathroom cabinet.

“After a half century of teaching and writing and after publishing ten books …,” Manfred Weidhorn writes, ” I entered the stage of life in which such matters dwindle in significance and one looks back rather on the road taken. Drawing on all my experiences and gathering the courage or, if you will, lapsing into the folly of hazarding conclusions about the larger picture, I have therefore in the past two years published three books on the meaning of it all.” One of those books is Landmines of the Mind: 1,500 Original and Impolite Assertions, Surmises, and Questions about Almost Everything, Mr. Weidhorn’s collection of astute and occasionally acerbic aphorisms. In the preface to Landmines, Mr. Weidhorn compares writing (and reading) to connecting the dots or, in the case of aphorisms, to not connecting the dots; instead just skipping “from one impression to another.” ‘Impression’ is definitely the right word here, since aphorisms are like pointillist paintings. Close up they may seem like a random collection of unformed, ill-placed splodges. But step back a bit and consider the whole and a definite pattern emerges. I guess we don’t so much connect the dots as linger long enough and pay enough attention to observe the dots connect themselves. Herewith, a few of Mr. Weidhorn’s points to ponder…

If young people should be seen and not heard, old people should be heard and not seen.

Blessed are the fortunate, for they have inherited the earth.

For people in developed countries, life consists mainly of moving from one room to another.

Some people would not be so wicked if the rest of us were not so stupid.

God spoke to you? He spoke to me too and told me to ignore you.

Actually, what does not kill me, often injures me grievously.

I first blogged about Sabahudin Hadzialic’s aphorisms back in 2009. Here is a fresh selection of his mordant black humor, translated into English by Anya Reich with a little idiomatic editing by me…

Socialist thought created a religion of ideology; capitalist thought created an ideology of religion.

In the Balkans, apathy is not the exception that proves the rule, it is the rule that excludes the exception!

Why do we hate each other? After all, we’re just three different tribes of the same people. But which tribe!?

Politicians decided to put an end to organized crime—by committing mass suicide!

Campaigning is when you want to influence the masses; manipulation is when you succeed.

Thomas Farber, senior lecturer in English at the University of California, Berkeley, has a new collection of epigrammatic epistles coming out in August: Foregone Conclusions. In the afterword to the book, Farber writes: “Humor. Writing and rewriting these spars and catarrhs, I often laughed. Because of wordplay, of course. But also because I was turning moral blindness, often my own, into recognition of the distance between error and self-knowledge, self-image and fact. If the epigrammist appears to presume himself superior to others, of course he’s implicated in all he perceives. As, when children, insulted, we’d retort, ‘Takes one to know one.’” For some of Farber’s conclusions that have gone before on this blog, click here and here.

Monogamy, so you can each focus on food.

The last two centuries. From village community (gemeinschaft) to atomistic capitalism (gesellschaft). From see to c.c.

Sleepless: nocternity.

When not repeating itself, history stutters.

He found it harder to distinguish between things intended and things done.

If the old ask, “Which way?” graciously explain, “Dead ahead.”

The Ledbury Poetry Festival starts today. Last year, The Guardian asked poets to name their most hated words. For this year’s festival, running until 10 July, the paper asked for ‘worn-out words‘, expressions that have become such cliches that they have lost all meaning. Here are their responses, including my own. You might not be surprised to learn that the expressions are all, er, metaphors…