Author: James Geary

If you love aphorisms and you love that wacky German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and you love that adorable comic strip The Family Circus, you’re gonna love this. My nephew, Dan Schank, recently alerted me to The Nietzsche Family Circus, which pairs a random Family Circus cartoon with a random quotation from Nietzsche. It is a truly astonishing combination. I was treated to the bespectacled Family Circus dad reading a Christmas story to his darling brood, with this Nietzsche caption underneath:

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.

And under a drawing of the Family Circus son, eating what appears to be a bowl of shredded wheat, this awesome Nietzschean proclamation:

Every tradition grows ever more venerable—the more remote its origin, the more confused that origin is. The reverence due to it increases from generation to generation. The tradition finally becomes holy and inspires awe.

The Nietzsche Family Circus is brought to you by the good folks at Losanjealous, an L.A. Web site publishing original creative content and the best local independent music and events calendars. You can refresh the page as often as you wish—careful, it’s addictive!—and share your favorites by clicking on a permalink. Enjoy The Nietzsche Family Circus with your bowl of shredded wheat today!

More proof, if such were needed, that the Balkans is one of the world’s aphoristic hot spots. Aleksandar Krzavac is a Serbian journalist, illustrator and playwright. He is the author of the satirical play Ludi I Zbunjeni (Crazed and Confused People), and his cartoons (sometimes erotic) have appeared widely in Serbian newspapers and magazines. Like a lot of Balkan aphorisms, Krzavac’s sayings are highly sarcastic, highly political, and highly amusing. Without a solid grounding in recent Balkan history, though, a lot of them go right over your head. “Most of my almost 2,000 aphorisms are not translatable,” Krzavac says, “or do not fit the Anglo-Saxon temperament and way of thinking.” The aphorisms that are translatable are well worth a read, and well-suited to every temperament. A selection:

Even the dead are unequal; some are in mausoleums.

The cult of personality has nothing to do with culture.

Not everything is black, the firefly said while looking at another firefly’s ass.

They say, “You are on the right path.” I think I am at a crossroads.

The revolution that eats its children starves to death.

If size mattered, dinosaurs would rule the world.

Joseph F. Conte says his two most interesting jobs have been as editor of a thoroughbred racing magazine in New York City and tour guide at a 900-year-old castle complex in Bergen, Norway. He writes about classical music, art, literature and philosophy, and he’s so far penned some 700 aphorisms. He cites Leibniz on the virtue of concision: “The intelligent author encloses the most of reality in the least possible compass.” Conte’s own aphorisms approach that ideal: They encapsulate a large chunk of reality in an extremely small space, while leaving plenty of room for thought. A selection from Maxims and Minims of a Philosopher, “in honor,” Mr. Conte says, “of La Rochefoucauld”:

Have your dreams, sure, but stay awake and do your work.

Just enough is plenty.

That which you love can become the banner by which you live.

Failure is an opportunity for you—to blame someone else.

Ice breaks up bridges; but a thawing wind breaks up ice.

Vesna Dencic is from Serbia, where she trained as a journalist and now writes poetry, literary essays, short stories and, of course, aphorisms. The Balkans is richly aphoristic, and these days Balkan aphorists have plenty of material to work with, given the region’s tumultuous recent political history. Dencic chronicles the Balkan aphoristic tradition on a number of Web sites, including Smeh do bola, which she describes as “aphorisms and everything about aphorisms.” She is also the founding editor of the satirical online magazine Etna. Her own aphorisms have a sharp satirical edge and, like Etna itself perhaps, harbor a molten core just below the surface. A selection:

We sold our soul to the devil. Now he’s coming to pick up the package.

Every time I turn on the TV I get lost in the dark.

I’m not afraid to say what I think. I’m afraid of thinking.

Every man of action needs woman of action—to clean up after him.

Vesna Dencic is from Serbia, where she trained as a journalist and now writes poetry, literary essays, short stories and, of course, aphorisms. The Balkans is richly aphoristic, and these days Balkan aphorists have plenty of material to work with, given the region’s tumultuous recent political history. Dencic chronicles the Balkan aphoristic tradition on a number of Web sites, including Smeh do bola, which she describes as “aphorisms and everything about aphorisms.” She is also the founding editor of the satirical online magazine Etna. Her own aphorisms have a sharp satirical edge and, like Etna itself perhaps, harbor a molten core just below the surface. A selection:

We sold our soul to the devil. Now he’s coming to pick up the package.

Every time I turn on the TV I get lost in the dark.

I’m not afraid to say what I think. I’m afraid of thinking.

Every man of action needs woman of action—to clean up after him.

As a college student, Lori Ellison dreamed of opening her own fortune cookie factory “with fortunes something like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies and aphoristic writings but couched in the assured language of divination.” Fortunately, she’s kept that dream alive by writing her own oblique yet assured aphorisms. A painter, writer, and lifetime independent bookstore clerk (semi-retired), Ellison is also a voracious consumer of aphorists’ biographies, most recently of Mae West, Karl Kraus, and G.C. Lichtenberg. Her aphorisms have something of all three of these aphorists: West’s humor and Kraus and Lichtenberg’s smart, satirical sensibilities. Ellison wishes to be known, in memoriam, some of the valiant independent bookstores she used to work for that are no longer in existence: Cokesbury Books (Richmond, VA), the Book Gallery in Willow Lawn Shopping Center (Richmond, VA), Watson & Co. Books (Austin, TX), and Gotham Book Mart, Posman’s Books, and Hacker Art Books (all in New York City). A selection of her aphorisms:

Spirituality is in the Inner Eye of the beholder.

Too varnished a style makes the eyes glaze over.

The only way those we intensely dislike can surprise us is by suddenly becoming likeable.

The nuclear family is easy to atomize.

Postmodernism was modernism’s midlife crisis.

We are not responsible for the character of the two characters that conspired in our conception.

As a college student, Lori Ellison dreamed of opening her own fortune cookie factory “with fortunes something like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies and aphoristic writings but couched in the assured language of divination.” Fortunately, she’s kept that dream alive by writing her own oblique yet assured aphorisms. A painter, writer, and lifetime independent bookstore clerk (semi-retired), Ellison is also a voracious consumer of aphorists’ biographies, most recently of Mae West, Karl Kraus, and G.C. Lichtenberg. Her aphorisms have something of all three of these aphorists: West’s humor and Kraus and Lichtenberg’s smart, satirical sensibilities. Ellison wishes to be known, in memoriam, some of the valiant independent bookstores she used to work for that are no longer in existence: Cokesbury Books (Richmond, VA), the Book Gallery in Willow Lawn Shopping Center (Richmond, VA), Watson & Co. Books (Austin, TX), and Gotham Book Mart, Posman’s Books, and Hacker Art Books (all in New York City). A selection of her aphorisms:

Spirituality is in the Inner Eye of the beholder.

Too varnished a style makes the eyes glaze over.

The only way those we intensely dislike can surprise us is by suddenly becoming likeable.

The nuclear family is easy to atomize.

Postmodernism was modernism’s midlife crisis.

We are not responsible for the character of the two characters that conspired in our conception.

Harry L.S. Knopf has been a practicing physician for over 30 years. As a comprehensive (general) ophthalmologist, he has treated babies, children, young adults, mature adults and the elderly. He is also part of a long and venerable tradition of medical aphorists that began with the main man himself, Hippocrates. The famous Greek physician composed hundreds of aphorisms, most of which were based on his experiences as a doctor and most of which were intended as teaching tools through which to educate young physicians. Many of Hippocrates’ aphorisms are medicine for the soul as much as for the body, and this is also the prescription that Harry Knopf fills. Most of his aphorisms, he says, are derived directly from interaction with patients. He often comes up with them while driving to and from the hospital where he practices. They are collected in Harry’s Homilies: Prescriptions for a Better Life, from which the following brief selection is made:

Life’s gifts are sometimes poorly wrapped.

Contentment comes from the realization of how much you already have.

There IS an answer for everything; you just have to make it up.

There are good days and bad days, happy days and sad days. The important thing to remember is that there are days.

An aphorism a day is my prescription for a happy, healthy mind. It is a prescription being filled with enormous verve and humor by guerrilla aphorists Nick Didkovsky and Charles O’Meara, at their quaintly titled but delightfully subversive site Aphorism of the Day. Didkovsky (a guitarist, composer, and software programmer) and O’Meara (a guitarist, drummer, composer, and registered nurse in psychiatry and behavioral health) have been friends since the late 1970s. Didkovsky founded the avant-rock septet Doctor Nerve and is the principle author of the computer music language Java Music Specification Language. O’Meara performs Irish traditional music and is presently working on an album with his instrumental jazz-rock band, Forever Einstein.

When they are not performing or recording music together, Didkovsky and O’Meara are composing brilliantly banal, profoundly pointless aphorisms. In the grand tradition of absurdist aphorists like Paul Eluard and Benjamin Peret (see 152 Proverbs Adapted to the Taste of the Day)

No one goes swimming in a deep forest.

and fictional 19th-century Russian aphorist Kozma Prutkov

I do not fully understand why many people call fate a turkey, and not some other bird more similar to fate.

Didkovsky and O’Meara are at work in the highly specialized field of aphoristic parody. Unlike other contemporary parodists, like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, whose humor is primarily satirical, Didkovsky and O’Meara write in a more farcical vein. Every 24 hours, the Aphorism of the Day site sports a gauzy image of a sunset or a mist-laden field with a hyperbolically obtuse aphorism plastered across it. Today’s inspirational saying, for example, is:

The sound of the turning page is like a fool urinating on money.

The sayings skewer the feel-good platitudes and greeting-card wisdom that populate so many desk-top and appointment calendars. They are guaranteed to raise a laugh, and an eyebrow. Go to Aphorism of the Day for your daily dose. In the meantime, here are a few Didkovsky-O’Mearisms to tide you over…

Look over your shoulder. If you see clouds, you are a giant.

Laughter is not heard where the cheese has become inedible.

Keep your gun but give the bullets to your enemy.

One hand invites the other.

Freedom is like a sack full of chains.

An aphorism a day is my prescription for a happy, healthy mind. It is a prescription being filled with enormous verve and humor by guerrilla aphorists Nick Didkovsky and Charles O’Meara, at their quaintly titled but delightfully subversive site Aphorism of the Day. Didkovsky (a guitarist, composer, and software programmer) and O’Meara (a guitarist, drummer, composer, and registered nurse in psychiatry and behavioral health) have been friends since the late 1970s. Didkovsky founded the avant-rock septet Doctor Nerve and is the principle author of the computer music language Java Music Specification Language. O’Meara performs Irish traditional music and is presently working on an album with his instrumental jazz-rock band, Forever Einstein.

When they are not performing or recording music together, Didkovsky and O’Meara are composing brilliantly banal, profoundly pointless aphorisms. In the grand tradition of absurdist aphorists like Paul Eluard and Benjamin Peret (see152 Proverbs Adapted to the Taste of the Day)

No one goes swimming in a deep forest.

and fictional 19th-century Russian aphorist Kozma Prutkov

I do not fully understand why many people call fate a turkey, and not some other bird more similar to fate.

Didkovsky and O’Meara are at work in the highly specialized field of aphoristic parody. Unlike other contemporary parodists, like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, whose humor is primarily satirical, Didkovsky and O’Meara write in a more farcical vein. Every 24 hours, the Aphorism of the Day site sports a gauzy image of a sunset or a mist-laden field with a hyperbolically obtuse aphorism plastered across it. Today’s inspirational saying, for example, is:

The sound of the turning page is like a fool urinating on money.

The sayings skewer the feel-good platitudes and greeting-card wisdom that populate so many desk-top and appointment calendars. They are guaranteed to raise a laugh, and an eyebrow. Go to Aphorism of the Day for your daily dose. In the meantime, here are a few Didkovsky-O’Mearisms to tide you over…

Look over your shoulder. If you see clouds, you are a giant.

Laughter is not heard where the cheese has become inedible.

Keep your gun but give the bullets to your enemy.

One hand invites the other.

Freedom is like a sack full of chains.