Author: James Geary

Rap star Kanye West doesn’t read books. But he knows what he likes, and what he likes are aphorisms, or at least something that almost sort of kind of approximates aphorisms. Despite his aversion to the printed word, West has co-authored a book of “thoughts and theories,” according to Canada’s National Post. The book, Thank You and You’re Welcome, is just 52 pages long, and apparently some of those pages are blank. “I am a proud non-reader of books,” West told the National Post. “I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life.” A selection of “Kanye-isms” follows. For more, you’ll have to read all 52 pages of the book.

Life is 5% what happens and 95% how you react!

I hate the word hate!

Get used to being used.

A truncated and dialectical form of the aphorism proper, kind of like the crushed cube a car becomes after it has been compressed in a junkyard, the oxymoron retains the paradox and provocation of the longer saying. Steven Carter (see his parables here; a posting about his aphorisms was lost in a catastrophic failure of the site a while back…) offers plenty of oxymorons to ogle in Little House of Oxymorons, which he describes as “a supplement to The New Devil’s Dictionary, a two-volume ‘sequel’ to Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary of a century ago”:

Scheduled departure: Get to the airport early. Right, so that your wait won’t exceed more than three-and-a-half hours.

Online learning: Online learning is to learning what phone sex is to sex.

Scheduled arrival: See “Scheduled Departure.”

Figuratively speaking: Literally speaking! “It’s literally raining cats and dogs,” exclaims a local weatherman.

Free will: Ambrose Bierce—Free will, O mortals, is a dream / Ye all are chips upon a stream.

Conventional wisdom: True wisdom is unconventional, to say the least, ever and always.

Considered opinion: Opinion.

Reality programming: Contemporary TV offerings, as tedious and stupid as they are highly orchestrated and edited.

Parkway: George Carlin—“Why do we park on a driveway and drive on a parkway?”

The center, we are told, should be our goal, both our starting point and our destination. But the fringes are far more interesting. It is here, on the periphery, where friction produces its most startling effects. It is here where everything rubs together, where boundaries blur, merge, become extended. Consider. From the tips of our tongues to the soles of our feet, we are all edges. The slightest touch sets off tremors, which ripple out in ever widening orbits—reminders that the universe does not revolve around us; we have to go out to meet it.

A version of this abbreviated essay appears in the May issue of Ode.

Tax preparation season has now passed, and surely we mourn that it is gone, but the trauma of this time put me in mind of financial aphorisms, spurred mostly by coming across the following quote from an auditor for the Inland Revenue, the U.K. tax authority: “The trick is to stop thinking of it as ‘your’ money.” Truer words were never spoken. Right on cue, Doug Rice, a financial planner in the San Francisco Bay Area, sent me his own compilation of pecuniary apophthegms, which he has compiled into Quipped Quotes: Reflections on Conventional Wisdom, a little book he distributes to friends and clients. The book is made up of a financial aphorism followed by a brief meditation by Doug on what the saying means for our practical financial lives. A selection follows, beginning with some of Doug’s own quotable quips…

To show the courage of your convictions requires you to have convictions in the first place. —Doug Rice

If your checkbook balances, chances are so does your life. —Doug Rice

We all know how the size of sums of money appears to vary in a remarkable way according as they are being paid in or paid out. —Julian Huxley

Creditors have better memories than debtors. —Benjamin Franklin

A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it. —Bob Hope

My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income. —Errol Flynn

When prosperity comes, do not use all of it. —Confucius

My idea of a group decision is to look in the mirror. —Warren Buffett

The public is right during the trend but wrong at both ends. —Humphrey Neill

When a person with experience meets a person with money, the person with experience will get the money. And the person with money will get some experience. —Leonard Lauder

Things refuse to be mismanaged long. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it—even if I have said it—unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense. —Budhha

Olivia Dresher alerts me to yet another wonderful aphorist from the pages of her excellent FragLit journal. Eric Nelson is a poet and professor of Writing and Linguistics at Georgia Southern University, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in creative writing. His publications include The Interpretation of Waking Life (University of Arkansas Press, 1991) and Terrestrials (Texas Review Press, 2004). I’m not sure whether to describe Nelson’s work as aphoristic poems or poetic aphorisms. He writes in verse form, in any case; i.e. short lines arranged on the page as a poem, with the first letter of each new line capitalized. But many of the poems are not more than a sentence in length. They sketch haiku-like scenes in the mind—of melting snowmen, a butterfly resting on a turd—but also mix an aphoristic bluntness with a more traditionally ‘poetic’ poignancy. The selection in FragLit is called “The Devil’s Almanac”; an allusion to the decidedly unpoetic Ambrose Bierce, perhaps? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what you call the sayings, of course. The important thing is to read them. You can do that below, and you can read more of Nelson’s aphorisms/poems here.

Only someone who still has it
Can say
Hope is a curse.

Happy memories
Are the saddest.

It’s not the going home
That’s hard.
It’s the wanting to.

It’s solitude if you like it.
Loneliness if you don’t.

Why oppose opposites?
A hammer pulls as well as drives.
Only what is buried grows.

A while back, Sherry Dalton pointed out some mis-attributions and typos in Geary’s Guide (which are duly noted on this site’s Corrections & Clarifications page) and sent along a copy of The Answerer, which she describes as “your personal adviser for the 21st century.” The Answerer is a kind of online oracle, a database of Dalton’s collection of some 26,000 quotations cross-referenced by author, subject, and keywords. It works sort of like the I Ching: Type in your question and The Answerer comes back with what it thinks is a relevant reply. Hopefully, Dalton has included some of her own aphorisms, wry and rueful reflections on some of the big questions to which we never seem to get the definitive answer…

The root of all evil is fear; its stem is abuse of power.

Nothing more fundamentally naive than cynicism.

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is interned.

They say it’s the cream that rises to the top. It’s the cream, alright; and the dead goldfish.

It doesn’t quite make sense. Why is repetition so interesting? Variety delights even as it disperses, but the thrill of the familiar persists. It’s like rehearsing a play; an actor gives depth and freshness to a role only by reciting the same lines over and over again, day after day after day. In the same way, practicing the piano is intensely boring—until you practice long enough. Repeating things makes them easy, and inclines them to give up their secrets. Perhaps that’s it. Maybe we’re just not paying attention. But it still doesn’t quite make sense. Why is repetition so interesting?

A version of this abbreviated essay appears in the April issue of Ode

Michael Theune describes himself as “a huge fan of aphorisms, probably bred into me by my upbringing in the church (I’m a preacher’s kid), which involved much exposure to proverbs and seductive gnomic utterances. I’ve been reading and thinking of them as an art form for more than fifteen years.” Theune is a self-confessed recovering E.M. Cioran addict. His own aphorisms are much more mischievous than Cioran’s (“so often humor is undervalued in discussions of the arts,” he says), though some rather immense and dark abysses can be glimpsed behind Theune’s puns and witticisms. Theune is also adept at glosses, clever spins on other people’s aphorisms. This is in the grand and ancient tradition of aphoristic sparring in which all lovers of the form delight. My favorite is his deflection of Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass: ” Do I contradict myself? Fine, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain platitudes.” Theune’s aphorisms are collectively called “Orthoparadoxy”. Here is a selection:

Flux is victorious but cannot accept the award.

Vision has become a version.

Second thoughts are tinder for the flames of Hell.

Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must scream, laugh, grunt, cry.

History consigned to the dustbin of information.

The rain that gives the roofers work sends the roofers home.

Nothing gives off more dust than stars.

All around the world, the mighty ocean musters all its strength to cry pssst! and shhh . . .

The hiss at the end of metaphysics—

I know there is something greater than me, but without me it wouldn’t matter quite so much.

Sometimes you have to spit on the world to make it shine.

So many are alive only for the sake of their salvation.

Attention founders between seeking and looking after.

Each country’s national traits show through in many different ways: in the food, the customs, popular entertainments, even the sense of humor. A nation reveals its character through its aphorisms, too. The French are usually witty and sophisticated; the Americans homespun and slapstick; the Finnish deadly serious and dour; the Russians dark and and bitterly funny. The Turks, judging from this brief selection of Turkish aphoristic delights, are courtly, philosophical and somewhat bemused, noting life’s follies and foibles with a kind of aloof shrewdness.

My thanks to Cihan Ozcan for tracking down and translating these aphorisms from the Turkish.

No revolutionary is any good at restoration, but they destroy perfectly.
—Abdulhamid

First we must know the truth. If we know the truth, we can know the false. But if the false is known first, it doesn’t take you to the truth.
—Farabi

The economy is like a river; it finds its course gradually.
—Turgut Ozal

Don’t be in the struggle of love but in the love of struggle.
—Peyami Safa

He who doesn’t live according to his thoughts starts to think according to his life.
—Silahtaroglu

Sadi

The thing that makes the mind confused is passion.

A lie is like a sword stroke; the scar remains even though the wound heals.

Mevlana

No matter how much you know, how much you say is exactly how much the listener understands.

A beautiful face falls in love with the mirror.

Both the question and the answer are born from wisdom.

Be as quiet as a book when with an ignorant person.

Cenap Sahabettin

Only those who are kind perceive kindness, but everybody perceives meanness.

The person who selfishly seeks a friend actually seeks a servant.

The more in the wrong we are ourselves, the more we look for other people’s mistakes.

Don’t bridle a dog; it might think it’s a horse.

He who loves himself a lot is loved by others that much less.

When the heart starts to talk, the brain becomes deaf.

Life is like a river. It splashes over small obstacles but passes quietly by the big ones.

The motto of the spontaneous aphorist (i.e. those who practice the ‘spontaneous combustion’ type of composition, in which aphorisms appear unedited and fully formed) might be, ‘First thought, best thought.’ That was the case for Alex Stein, whose collection of aphorisms, Weird Emptiness, was published by Wings Press in 2007. Stein sent an entirely different manuscript to Roberto Bonazzi, then an editor at Wings Press, who pointed out three pieces he thought were worthwhile. “Curiously,” says Stein, “the three pieces he pointed out were each (and even more tellingly, the only) pieces I had culled, unedited, from the notebooks that have unceasingly attended my efforts at fiction and poetry. Notebooks in which, with utter self-absorption and a transparently deluded sense of my own importance in the larger context of Literature, I had been commenting on my process, aesthetics, mentorship, artistry, and creative life.” These pieces, along with more like them, became Weird Emptiness, from which I spontaneously append a selection below:

Bridge or a Wall. If you write in order to develop a relationship with your fellow human beings and your writing becomes the sole constitution of that relationship, is your writing, then, a bridge or a wall?

The Holy Bible. Perhaps The Holy Bible was written in “the final days” of its world. A memorial, of sorts, as opposed to a visionary work. The only inspired aspect of it being that revolutionary style which makes it such a compelling read. Would it really be so strange to live in a world for which a Bible had not yet been written? Or, rather, say we have no need of prophecy in this age, having at hand so much of history for reference.

The Mystic. When the mystic stares into the eternal, he becomes the eternal. This is neither an act of will, nor a voyage of self-discovery. It is an acknowledgement of the inwardness of outwardness, which is to say it is an acknowledgement of the fact that no division exists.

Conscience. Everything I write is completely personal, as well as utterly disengaged. The issues of form, for me, always supersede the specificities of content. I draw entirely from my own life because I do not believe it is polite to speculate upon the inner world of anyone but myself. One would have to be both clairvoyant and magnanimous to do otherwise with anything like a clear conscience.

Poetry is a surprising sport. One often flushes the jester from the meadow when one is chasing butterflies.

A poem should be no longer than the person who writes it.