Aphorisms

Thanks to Neil Denny for such a fun, wide-ranging conversation on the Little Atoms podcast, largely structured around consideration of individual aphorists from the book, including Jesus (12:00-14:50), Jean Toomer (20:00-22:05), Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker and Samuel Hoffenstein (24:15-26-35), and Sarah Manguso (28:30-30:30), among others.

And thanks to Jacke Wilson at The History of Literature podcast for an equally fun, wide-ranging conversation featuring a discussion of aphorisms as mnemonic devices for intense experience (14:30-16:00) and aphorisms as rhetorical devices (28:10-32:50) and also, coincidentally, largely structured around consideration of individual aphorists from the book, including Confucius (34:30-36:50), Montaigne (37:00-39-25), and E.M. Cioran (39:40-43:45).

For an excellent exploration of aphorisms as expressions of political dissent and social critique, check out The Londoner’s profile of Nick, who hangs billboards with aphorisms and aphorism-adjacent slogans on them from the balcony of his second-floor flat near Finsbury Park station. Each of Nick’s signs, Roland Hughes reports, “always have a phrase painted on it, [are] always nearly a metre high, always in bold, black-on-white sans-serif lettering. When it comes to his messages, Nick has a few rules. They will contain a pithy, usually three- or four-word slogan. They will usually hint at a deep distrust of authority and, to put it politely, the way information is distributed. There will be common themes: war, protest laws, surveillance, the media. Nick’s favourites, he says, are ‘ones that question the narratives; the acceptance of which, let’s face it, has got us into a terrible state.’”

Some of Nick’s posts include…

WHICH LIES DO YOU BELIEVE?

EXPECT ANOTHER FALSE FLAG PSYOP

MAKE THE SKY BLUE AGAIN

REGISTER YOUR CHICKEN

Nick’s work is a great example of the aphorism as public art, appropriating the language and distribution methods of advertising to make political statements, as artists like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger have been doing since the 1970s.

One of the things that’s most fun about doing book talks is hearing all the aphorisms people share with me before, during, and after the talks. After a recent talk, Vincent Straub, a university student, handed me an envelope that contained a selection of his aphorisms, which are sharp, funny, and have the philosophical twist we spent some time discussing during the talk. Here are a few of his sayings…

Those who do not want to live together will die together.

In today’s world, nothing is as present as absence.

Our best political friendships are with those with whom we share the same level of confusion.

Heaven is a dance floor with bookshelves.

In an email exchange with Vincent, I suggested he might want to revise some of his aphorisms after writing them. As someone who typically practices the ‘spontaneous combustion’ method of aphorism composition, I need to hear this advice myself. It might seem strange to revise a composition that’s already so short, maybe a dozen words at most. But revision is part of the writing process for works of every length; it’s not an optional afterthought or something you do when you’re ‘finished.’ For example, the ironic effect of Vincent’s

It is a marvel to grow up and watch how your parents develop

could be heightened by changing up the word choice:

It is a marvel to grow up and watch your parents mature.

The word ‘mature’ has richer connotations in this context and enhances the reversal of a child watching parents mature when usually it’s the other way around. Similarly, further refining already refined sentences like

Those who stay sitting will never feel their shackles

can make them even more pointed and powerful:

You never feel your shackles if you never stand up.

Distilling ‘stay sitting’ into ‘stand up’ adds crucial allusions to ‘standing up for yourself’ while the addition of the second person form of direct address makes the whole more definitive.

I had the chance to see the rewards of revision in my own work after rediscovering some aphorisms I had written while living in San Francisco. I noted that an early version of one saying read

I’d rather be a voice in the desert than a face in the crowd

but I revised it to

Better a voice in the desert than a face in the crowd

which is much stronger since it removes the first person reference, making the observation more outward-directed, and it changed the sentence from a preference to a directive, which prompted the composition of an aphorism about writing, which spontaneously combusted and I did not revise:

Revision is precision.

This is the talk delivered by George Murray at the International Aphorism Conference in Wroclaw, Poland on October 25, 2025. George is a Canadian poet, teacher, and editor. I’ve blogged about his aphorisms here and here. —JG

My talk today is about how I see the poetic aphorism as differing from the philosophical aphorism, but also how the form creates a bridge between the two intellectual endeavours. In order to get where I need to go with this, I must to give you a bit of my history with the form.

I wrote my first (intentional) aphorisms in 2008. The year before, I had been invited to speak at Princeton on Canadian Poetry, and the organizers planned a public reading for me as a poet. I was paired with James Richardson (scroll down for blog posts about Jim’s aphorisms here and here —JG), a venerable and much-beloved American poet and aphorist, and then-head of the Creative Writing program at Princeton.

I read from my recently released book of sonnets that employed an unusual form – “rhyming” ideas instead of sounds as its formal constraint. So, for instance, a word like “night” could rhyme with a synonym like “evening” or an antonym like “day” or homonym like “knight” (on a horse) or even an anagram like “thing”. This had garnered a lot of attention in the Canadian poetry world.

But it wasn’t this innovation that interested Richardson. After the reading, as Jim and I sat at a local pub, he commented on the closing couplets of my sonnets, saying something like, “Your poems often seem to end on an aphorism, as if you were writing up toward them. You should look in your journals to see if you have more little nuggets you haven’t yet put into a poem.”

Who was I to argue? Richardson was one of the few North American masters of the poetic aphorism, and at this point, I’d never even heard of them at the time. I had always thought of the aphorism as a philosophical form.

So, once back in Canada, I looked through my motley collection of scribblers and moleskins and found not dozens, but hundreds of aphorisms. These were little thoughts that had weight and depth but had somehow never found their way into a poem. In total, there were nearly 1,000 of them scattered through decades of old notebooks.

I subsequently published two books of aphorisms, Glimpse and Quick, in 2010 and 2017 respectively. Both have sold well in the Canadian book market – a market that typically doesn’t respect or value poetry as a commodity worth paying for. Canada is a place where selling 500 copies of a book of poems is considered a successful run, and I am lucky enough to sell well, but these books of aphorisms were selling more. In fact, because there is no poetry “Bestseller Lists” in Canada, my first book Glimpse made it onto the bestseller list in one paper under the “fiction” category. (I found this funny, that a book of “truths” would be listed under fiction.)

Why is this, I wondered? Why do well-crafted and thoughtful poems not spark the imagination of the public in the way aphorisms do? It’s easy to say that poetry can be difficult for those that grew up only encountering it in school, or that the form feels archaic and irrelevant to the current milieux, or even that we live in a time of sound-bites and tweets and abbreviation that already mimic the form of the aphorism, but is that truly what’s going on?

Some people, like our keynote speaker James Geary, see the aphorism also as a vehicle for delivering those philosophical “deep thoughts” to casual readers in a friendly manner.  In his interview with the Harvard Gazette dated Oct 10, 2025, James asserts that aphorisms must make you think, but that they also “have to be super accessible; you can understand them in a second.”

I see what he means, and I think I agree, but I come at the whole endeavour from another angle – a poetic one. One that is used to allusion, nuance, and multiplicity of meaning. So yesterday when James said that the aphorism must be “effortful, not effortless”, I thought, “Aha, now I see what he means. And we do agree.”

For me, poetry is, at its core, an art anyone can practice, but not all can master. Just as anyone can become an apprentice carpenter, learning the tools and tricks of that trade to plane and cut and join wood, so too can anyone become an apprentice poet, learning to hide and reveal, join and break, state and allude in order to elicit epiphany on the part of the reader. And just as with poetry, not every carpenter can go on to greatness as a fine artist in cabinet making or turning or other wood working. Most remain merely serviceable workaday craftspeople.

Even so, every person in this room, in this building, in this city, in the world, has had the experience of epiphany. A sudden dawning. A realization. A poetic moment – those moments of profundity where thoughts come unbidden about the meaning and scope of life as we know it. Maybe they’re sitting looking at a sunbeam from their window and watching the dust motes float about, and thinking, “There’s something here. Something important at the edges of my consciousness.”

The major artistic difference between them and a poet like me is, I’ve spent 30 years training myself to recognize such moments, and to capture them as quickly and elegantly, as possible.

As a poet, when I have a moment like this, I roll it over in my mind, make my hasty notes, and later, when fleshing them out, I lay down layers of craft and form.

See, the initial trick with an epiphany is to realize you’re having one. After that, it’s a race to capture its beauty and meaning before it begins to decay in your mind. A scramble to write it down as faithfully as possible but then slowing the process down to really examine it and flesh out its levels of meaning and nuance.

This is all part of the hopeful endeavour to elicit a similar epiphany in the mind of the reader, to convey my wonder and thought, and to make the poem sing. I take an idea and illuminate it, not unlike a medieval manuscript. My goals are elegance and beauty, but also a satisfying and allusive complexity. I want to create something that flows and has grace on the tongue but also offers a deeper level for those willing to explore it.

That said, I feel no special obligation to “accessibility”. I subscribe to the idea that poetry worth reading is poetry worth rereading.

In the end, the aphorism works differently for me. It arrives as a statement that immediately tells me the rest of the “poem” is unnecessary. This doesn’t mean it’s whole. It may require editing and crafting, but it can be perfected without the flourish and linguistic fireworks common to poetry. Aphorisms are worked on – pared down, added to, crafted, like a poem, but they need no poetry around them to sing. They use the tools of poetry, like metaphor, metonymy, imagery, play with idiom and cliché, etc., but they do so economically and succinctly.

A few examples (All from Glimpse, ECW Press, 2010):

Rubble becomes ruin when the tourists arrive.

As with the knife, the longer the conversation, the less frequently it comes to a point.

Anyone who yells loud enough can be famous among the pigeons.

Until quite recently, I explained aphorisms to the uninitiated as “poetic essences” – by which I mean, they are “poems without all the poetry getting in the way”. A poetic essence, I held, is a thought or epiphany or idea that requires no more elaboration than the statement itself, yet it is still a poem.

An aphorism is not always a simple thing, or an uncrafted thing, in that over time it is laboured over in equal measure to any of my poems – but it is a whole piece that requires no further lyrical exploration to convey the totality of its meaning and elegance.

In a sense, the poetic aphorism can be seen as the “core” of a poem that never was and needn’t ever be. It does the work of a poem, in that it offers the chance of epiphany to the reader willing to reach for it, but it does so in a more direct way, eschewing the layers and nuance of poetry in favour of efficiency and a more direct clarity of meaning.

A good poem, I tell my students, is one that can be read many times in many ways without losing its appeal. It has layers of meaning that reveal themselves on second, third, fourth, and so on, readings. An aphorism, I say, and as James writes, can usually gloss on the first read, meaning it gives up the goods quickly and directly.

Yet, for a poet – or at least for this poet – I have come to realize that is not entirely true. In writing aphorisms as a poet, I can’t help but concentrate on adding back in the nuance and layers of meaning while also offering efficiency and clarity.

I want my reader to grasp the idea of the aphorism on first read but find other layers as they return to it later. I want the reader to stop and say, “Huh” when coming to the piece a second time. I want the language to offer multiplicity instead of uniformity of vision, which seems somewhat antithetical to the nature of the form.

As with poetry, I don’t think requiring a reader to reread for a fuller understanding is a negative. I see it as a positive – an element that extends the value and life of the piece.

More examples (From Glimpse, ECW Press, 2010):

The body is what happens when the mind wanders.

Panic is worry on a tight schedule.

Dirt is what we heap upon enemies; loam our dead; earth our children.

This forces me to ask myself: Are my poems then just aphorisms that are overwritten? I’ve checked. Some of them are.

In many cases, you can reduce a poem to a single line or two outlining its essential meaning. Like what we call an “elevator pitch” for a poem – a direct statement against the poem’s coy play. But with most such distillations, the nuance and elegance can be lost. In the end, the poem requires poetry and poetic investigation, while the aphorism can employ the tools of poetry, but doesn’t require it.

I know this because I find that some ideas really do arrive fully formed, already an aphorism – announcing themselves as such on their way through the mind’s front (or back) door. They feel complete on arrival, even if in need of editing and craft – like flowers that skip the stage of the bulb, heading straight to petals.

In the same way a good short story can do the work of a novel in 30 pages, a good aphorism should be able to do the work of a long poem in one or two lines.

To illustrate this, in my second book of aphorisms, Quick, I even tried to take well-known longer poems and reduce them to a single thought. This resulted in varying levels of success. Many of the more spectacular failures were not included. These poems were too tangled or unsure of themselves or diverse in subject to distill.

Through this experiment I learned one can never capture all the nuance and allusion of poems of that scope in an aphorism – but one can focus on a single, pervasive idea, and craft an aphorism from it.

Examples (All from Quick, ECW Press, 2017):

TS Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

The mind’s cacophony is caused by the same thing as the city’s: crowds.

Alan Ginsberg, “Howl”:

The lamb that hears the growl needn’t stick around for the howl.

Margaret Atwood, “This Is a Photograph of Me”:

In a world made of surfaces the only place to hide is in depths.

Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again” (A poem-to-aphorism conversion which is particularly relevant right now):

A dream’s best intentions often end up a waking nightmare.

They allude to the source poem and even sometimes illuminate it, but overall lack the levels of meaning, focusing instead on a single layer and elevating it through the exclusion of other thought.

This is important because this is how aphorisms work for me. They are indeed poems without all the poetry getting in the way, but they are also thoughts without all the thinking getting in the way.

So, in the end, the sort of aphorisms I write are not in fact distilled poems, nor are they philosophical statements. They are their own form – separate from, but owing allegiance to, both poetry and philosophy. They evoke, allude, and refer as poems do, and they also tackle thoughts with depth and metaphysical importance the way philosophy does, all in the most economical way possible, but with grace, beauty, and nuance. I would pose a new term for their relationship to poetry going forward. Instead of poetic essences, I would call them “philosophical or poetic cores” or even “poetic allies”. They are not poems, nor are they really philosophy, but for me they are, at their best, both philosophical and poetic.

Thank you.

On the Tube the other day, I spotted a billboard for Heinz with the tagline:

Beanz Meanz Heinz

I liked the wordplay and the fact that the tagline is aphorism-adjacent, if not an actual aphorism. It follows almost all of the five laws of the aphorism… it’s short, definitive, has an author (the Kraft Heinz Company or its advertising agency), and it has a twist (the cacographic spelling and the slant rhyme between the ‘ea’ and ‘ei’ sounds). The one law it does not meet: It’s not philosophical. (Full disclosure: You have multiple food manufacturer options when purchasing beans.)

Advertisements, along with slogans and sound bites, do arguably espouse a kind of philosophy, one associated with a specific product or political party, for example. The philosophies they promote, however, urge homogeneity (of buying or voting patterns, at least), not the iconoclasm of the aphorism. Another crucial difference between advertisements and aphorisms is that ads are intended to induce commercial action, while aphorisms are intended to induce psychological action.

The best ads aspire to the state of aphorism; the worst are filled with a passionless vapidity.

In fact, the closer an advertising slogan comes to being an aphorism, the more effective it is. Take my favorite catchphrase of all time, a statement as profound and urgent as the ancient Latin maxim of Carpe diem, brought to us in the mid-­aughts by the good people at Müller to sell their yogurt (Full disclosure: You have multiple food manufacturer options when purchasing yogurt):

Lick the lid of life

Advertisements and aphorisms are alike in the accelerated kinds of thinking they try to encourage or subvert. A successful ad convinces you you need a specific kind of stuff; a successful aphorism, like the Müller yogurt maxim, convinces you you need to take a specific action or embrace a specific state of mind.

My talk delivered at the International Aphorism Conference in Wroclaw, Poland on October 24, 2025

Whenever I’m lucky enough to travel to another country, or return from abroad to my own, I’m always reminded of an aphorism by the British novelist Norman Douglas:

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.

I didn’t spot many noteworthy advertisements when I arrived in Wroclaw, apart from a couple of billboards for local spas at the airport. But I did spot a noteworthy aphorism printed in the menu of the restaurant, Konspira, I happened to wander into for dinner last night.

The aphorism I discovered in the menu was the poem “Desiderata” by Max Ehrmann. “Desiderata” is one of the most widely known poems in the English language — a series of maxims on the things to be desired from a life well-lived — and it was especially popular during the counterculture movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. It was especially popular here in Poland, too, during the anti-communist resistance of the 1970s and ‘80s.

One of the lines from the poem is:

Speak your truth quietly and clearly.

which is what I will try to do today. I will also have to update Norman Douglas’s aphorism to account for my experience at Konspira:

You can tell the ideals of a nation by the aphorisms in its restaurant menus.

Another thing I learned about in the Konspira menu was Orange Alternative, the resistance movement that started here in Wroclaw in the 1980s that used satire and absurdity to protest the Soviet regime. One of the things Orange Alternative did was paint images of dwarves on walls where the authorities had covered over graffiti of political dissent. The idea was to expose the authoritarian regime as ridiculous. As Orange Alternative leader Waldemar Fydrych said, “Can you treat a police officer seriously when he is asking you: ‘Why did you participate in an illegal meeting of dwarves?’”

Now I understand why there are so many little sculptures of dwarves all across the city and why there is a Wroclaw Festival of Dwarves every September.

In English, another word for dwarf is gnome. And another meaning for gnome is aphorism. The English word ‘gnome’ comes from the Greek gnōme, which means ‘thought’ or ‘opinion,’ which in turn comes from the word gignōskein, which means ‘to know.’ So it is my honor to talk to you today — in this city filled with gnomes, in this room filled with gnomes — about how aphorisms help us know.

The advertisement I want to talk about is one I saw in my own country, the United States, but it’s an ad that says something about all of us, regardless of what country we’re from. This advertisement is from the website domain and hosting company GoDaddy, for its Airo service, which uses artificial intelligence to help small business owners create logos, websites, and social content for their companies.

The ad shows Walter Goggins — star of the TV show White Lotus — talking about how actors can make you believe they know what they’re doing when, in fact, they do not know what they’re doing. Goggins is shown playing a detective strolling through a crime scene, oblivious to the fact that he’s disturbing evidence with every step. He’s shown playing an astronaut during some kind of spacecraft crisis frantically pushing buttons without, he confides to the camera, knowing what any of the buttons do. He’s shown playing a race car driver driving the wrong way — against the traffic — around the racetrack. The ad’s tagline is:

It’s like you know what you’re doing.

And its promise to users of GoDaddy’s service is: You don’t need knowledge, expertise, experience, analysis, or insight — because Airo’s AI will handle all that for you!

Now, not knowing what I’m doing — personally or professionally, psychologically or emotionally — is a condition with which I am not unfamiliar. Perhaps many of you, too, occasionally find yourselves unsure how you arrived in a particularly difficult situation and how you might get yourself out of it. It’s kind of a basic human condition, isn’t it, as noted by aphorists like Samuel Butler:

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

and Cyril Connolly:

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk.

But my goal, in my work and in my life is not, like Walter Goggins, to seem like I know what I’m doing. My goal is to actually know what I’m doing — to try and fail, to fall down and get up, to learn from mistakes, and through persistence, fortitude, and a bit of luck to maybe figure a few things out.

AI can’t help me with that. But aphorisms can.

Both writing and reading aphorisms train our brains to think for ourselves, to cut through propaganda and partisanship, to not blindly accept what the authoritarians or the algorithms tell us, and to instead, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in one of his aphorisms:

Insist on yourself.

So many of our communication channels — online and in real life —­ are filled with partisan propaganda and hashtag claptrap. Our feeds are clogged with trash talk and gauzy inspirational quotes, byte-­sized chunks of outrage, hot takes that inflame but shed no light, information bubbles bloated by confirmation bias, and artificial intelligence generating genuine stupidity.

Now generative AI programs like Airo and ChatGPT promise to reduce our cognitive loads to zero, removing the annoying need to design our own logos, provide content for our own websites, or write our own emails (or aphorisms!).

There are many ways in which AI has the potential to dramatically improve our lives, from accelerating drug discovery to optimizing energy use from renewable resources. There are also many ways in which AI has the potential to dramatically worsen our lives, and one way in particular — By making things that are supposed to be difficult easy.

So I propose a different form of AI that everyone should download immediately: Aphoristic Intelligence.

For millennia, since the origins of the form in ancient China and Egypt, aphorisms have not simplified complicated issues, but deepened their complexity. They have not offered easy solutions to hard problems but embraced their difficulty. Aphorisms are effortful not effortless, participatory not passive.

The first aphorism I remember reading came from the pages of Reader’s Digest, a general interest magazine to which my parents subscribed when I was a kid. I must have been around 8 years old at the time I read the following sentence by Gerald Burrill, the Episcopal bishop of Chicago:

The difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.

At the time, of course, I had no idea what an aphorism was. I was just a kid. But there was something about this brief, unusual saying — and the others I discovered on the Quotable Quotes pages of Reader’s Digest — that attracted me. I loved the puns, paradoxes, the clever turns of phrase. And I was amazed at how such a compact statement could contain so much meaning.

Gerald Burrill’s aphorism is chilling, a graphic warning that drudgery is habit-forming, that thoughtless routine is the enemy of joy. It doesn’t offer an easy fix or a neat solution. In fact, it doesn’t offer a fix or a solution at all. What it does do is confront you with the problem and remind you of what’s at stake. It is a great example of the power of Aphoristic Intelligence at work.

Overcoming adversity, dealing with disappointment and grief, working your way through doubt or confusion — these things are supposed to be hard! The difficulty is the point. Aphorisms aren’t there to make things easier for you or to cheer you up. They’re there to help you cope — by making you question your beliefs, assumptions, biases, and certainties.

And, though aphorisms are brief, this questioning becomes a lifelong pursuit. I’ve been obsessing about the respective depths of ruts and graves for more than fifty years now, wondering every morning whether I’m simply walking to work or slowly burying myself. As artificial intelligence infiltrates all aspects of our lives, it threatens to disrupt the Aphoristic Intelligence that is vital to knowing ourselves and to knowing others.

Friend is an AI-powered pendant that listens in on the user’s activities — watching television, playing video games, chatting with human friends in real life — and comments on them via text messages sent to the user’s phone. Too busy to give your mom a quick call? For about $35 a month, you can have the AI service InTouch call her every day for 5 to 10 minutes and then send you a summary of the conversation, helpfully noting if she seems depressed or doesn’t pick up the phone. Grem, an AI-powered fluffy toy, does the same for toddlers, learning a child’s personality and then having conversations with them, which are also helpfully recorded and transcribed.

In 2023, the then-U.S. Surgeon General described loneliness as an “epidemic”, and the World Health Organization has called loneliness a “pressing health threat.” The creators of some of these AI devices say they are intended to address loneliness as well as to provide disconsolate teens with a sympathetic chat bot. Almost 75% of American teenagers say they have consulted an AI companion at least once.

But researchers warn that over-reliance on AI, especially if it starts in childhood, could impair the development of the essential social skills needed when interacting with other human beings. And if chat bots offer teenagers nothing but relentless affirmation and validation, young people will never learn how to handle the difficulties and discomfort involved in real relationships with real people.

Trouble, distress, and hardship are inevitable in life, not optional. As American aphorist Ambrose Bierce wisely observed,

Misfortune, n; the kind of fortune that never misses.

Aphorisms teach us to rely on our own intelligence in times of mishap, doubt, or crisis. As Swedish aphorist Vilhelm Ekelund wrote,

To be placed on treacherous ground is good. We generally only learn to stand on our own two feet when the ground is shaking underneath them.

In studying the effects of AI on learning, researchers note that people who rely excessively on AI-generated outputs experience fewer instances of intellectual difficulty and disruption — because the AI is solving problems for them. Without difficulty and disruption, though, learners are not forced to engage their own critical thinking skills. Why would they? There’s an AI for that.

When critical thinking weakens and withers, the nature of thinking itself starts to shift — from introspection to outsourcing, from skepticism to gullibility, from thinking for ourselves to just following instructions.

A recent study compared performance on a writing task among university students who had help from ChatGPT, help from a human writing expert, help from writing analytics tools, and no extra help at all. One finding: The ChatGPT group significantly outperformed the other groups on essay score improvement — even the group that had help from a human writing expert.

However, the ChatGPT group did not show a corresponding improvement in knowledge gain. “While ChatGPT can enhance short-term task performance,” the researchers concluded, “it may not boost intrinsic motivation or long-term learning outcomes.” In other words, the ChatGPT-assisted writers seemed like they knew what they were writing when, in fact, they did not.

There are multiple studies showing similar results for writers who rely on AI to do their writing:

• Higher confidence in AI is associated with less critical thinking; higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking
• Those using AI to write report a sense of diminished ‘cognitive agency’; they don’t claim full ownership — or any ownership — of what they have written
• In one study, not a single AI user could accurately quote from their own text, while those who didn’t use AI could accurately quote from their own text

Researchers studying AI have warned that tools like ChatGPT may promote learners’ dependence on technology, potentially triggering what they call “metacognitive laziness” — delegating challenging learning tasks to external tools in order to reduce our cognitive loads. Equally if not more concerning is another risk — metaphysical laziness, delegating challenging existential questions to external tools in order to reduce our metaphysical loads.

Writing is thinking. If you’re not doing your own writing, you’re not doing your own thinking. No wonder AI users couldn’t quote from their own texts; the words were not their own.

Writing aphoristically is thinking aphoristically. And this is the most concentrated, intensive, challenging kind of writing and thinking that there is — trying to get to the essence of an existential question and distill it into a single image, metaphor, sentence.

The danger is that we allow AI to train us into becoming spectators to our own thought processes, to our own creativity. I don’t want to be a clueless bystander to the delightful, distressing, essential process of figuring things out for myself, unable to quote passages from my own mental and emotional life.

Aphoristic Intelligence is the antidote for metaphysical laziness. Aphorisms revel in cognitive effort. They instigate debate rather than reinforce dogma. They confront us with inconvenient truths. Aphorisms amp up the difficulty — precisely in order to trigger the often painful but always rewarding process of critical thinking.

Take one of La Rochefoucauld’s most cynical — and most painfully honest — aphorisms:

In the adversity of even our best friends we always find something not wholly displeasing.

This saying doesn’t sugarcoat or disguise an unappealing but very real aspect of human nature — that twinge of resentment at a friend’s success, that guilty pleasure when for once things don’t go their way. It’s an unseemly side to our feelings that we would rather not be confronted with. But because we are confronted with it, we can think critically about it — and vow, perhaps, next time to become better.

Aphorisms present us with moral and philosophical thought experiments and demand that we figure them out. If you outsource the difficulty and discomfort of that process, there’s no point. You’ll never cross the finish line if a robot runs the race for you. As Austrian aphorist Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach put it:

Those who were carried to a goal should not think they’ve reached it.

Aphoristic Intelligence helps us reach our goals while standing on our own two feet, even when the ground is shaking beneath them.

The increasing use of AI in writing is of particular urgency to those of us who devote our lives and livelihoods to words. For me, though, the question of whether AI can write better aphorisms than human beings is not the most important question.

Given the most basic prompts, systems like ChatGPT are quite adept at penning essays, poems, short stories, plays, novels, academic papers — even aphorisms. AI performs in seconds tasks that can take a human writer a lifetime to master. Such systems, trained on pirated editions of copyrighted books and the vast anthology that is the Internet, are far more widely read than a single person could ever be.

ChatGPT can already write a better villanelle than me. Why shouldn’t it be able to writer a better aphorism, too? And if some AI-generated aphorisms are bad, are they any worse than the bad aphorisms human beings are capable of producing? The more important question is, I think, What is it that I alone can write?

Eighteenth-century French aphorist François-­Auguste-­René de Chateaubriand wrote,

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

There is enough of my writing online — and AI firms have pirated enough of my books — for chat bots to be able to simulate me. When prompted to write an aphorism in the style of James Geary, ChatGPT came up with:

In life’s tapestry, metaphors weave truth’s cloak, disguising wisdom in the folds of everyday moments.

This is a terrible aphorism, but it is a fair approximation of my interests as a writer. I do like metaphors — a lot! — and I do emphasize the relevance of metaphor, wit, and aphorisms to everyday life. The problem is not how terrible this aphorism is; ChatGPT is perfectly capable of writing really good aphorisms, and I am perfectly capable of writing terrible ones (just take a look at my aphorisms on my website if you don’t believe me). The problem is, this is and will always remain a bad imitation, a digital copy of digital copies of me.

When you transfer an analog source to a digital file, then copy that digital file to other digital formats and platforms, some data gets lost. The more you copy the file, the more data gets lost — and the further you get from the original.

That’s what it’s like with writing and artificial intelligence. ChatGPT can’t do my writing for me, because it’s not me. Just as I don’t want to be a bystander to the process of figuring things out for myself, I don’t want to become so metaphysically lazy that I end up a bystander to my own writing. We are — all of us — original writers whom no AI can imitate.

Lee Seong-Bok is a South Korean poet and aphorist who taught creative writing for many years. After retiring in 2012, he emailed his former students, asking them to send him excerpts from the notes they had taken in his classes. The result is Indeterminate Inflorescence: Lectures on Poetry, a series of aphorisms about writing, including this one:

Living, seeing, and writing are the same thing. We must become poetry-­writing machines.

Lee says we must “become poetry-writing machines.” I think his aphorism applies to aphorisms, too: We must become aphorism-writing (and, I would add, aphorism-reading) machines.

Human beings learn a lot like AI systems do, through trial and error. But if you’re not trying, you’re not erring. And if you’re not erring, you’re not learning. If you want same-day delivery of solutions to your existential dilemmas, then sign up for Friend or Airo right away. But if you want to actually know what you’re doing, rather than seem like you know what you’re doing, you belong in the land of becoming — becoming a more critical thinker, becoming a more confident problem-solver, becoming a better aphorist, becoming your own imperfect person. That’s a lifelong process that can’t be offloaded onto a computer, a process that, if done right, results in a state of knowing, not seeming.

Like Friedrich von Schlegel said,

One can only become a philosopher, not be one. As soon as one thinks one is a philosopher, one stops becoming one.

So, Aphoristic Intelligence is essential for the process of becoming, pushing back against metaphysical laziness, but it is also essential for pushing back against political polarization and partisanship, especially now at a time when free speech is under threat in so many places and the world is awash in disinformation and deepfakes.

OpenAI’s release of its Sora 2 video generator promises to allow users to “step into any world or scene,” and people are already using it to demean and deceive by creating deepfake videos that make it seem like you know what you’re seeing when, in fact, you do not.

In Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, his 1961 study of the brainwashing techniques used by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1950s, psychologist Robert Jay Lifton defined what he called the “thought-terminating cliché” as language that is “repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull” — in other words, anti-aphorisms.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s insistence that his barbaric war against Ukraine be called a “special military operation” is a classic example of the thought-terminating cliché at work. There can be no thought of war — or its catastrophic human toll — if the word itself is banned. President Trump’s insistence that the climate crisis is a “hoax” is the same. There can be no thought of the climate crisis’s catastrophic toll if we cannot even call it by its name.

When one does not know how to convince, one oppresses.

is how 19^th-century political theorist Madame de Staël described it.

The person oppressed by thought-terminating clichés is “linguistically deprived,” Lifton argued, “and since language is so central to human experience, his capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely narrowed.” We must not allow our capacities for thinking and feeling to be narrowed down to nothing by the thought-terminating clichés of authoritarians or by the metaphysical laziness of artificial intelligence.

Poland’s own Stanislaw Jerzy Lec did not allow his capacities for thinking and feeling to be narrowed down to nothing by the thought-terminating clichés of Soviet rule. He challenged himself and his readers with aphorisms that landed repeated blows for free speech and free thought without the censors ever knowing what hit them. He wrote some of the greatest political aphorisms of all time — biting criticisms of repression and witty celebrations of dissent…

Politics: a Trojan horse race.

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

The weakest link in the chain is also the strongest. It can break the chain.

Aphoristic Intelligence — in dictatorships and democracies, autocracies and oligarchies — is the superpower of the powerless. It parses arguments; it doesn’t default to partisanship. It encourages dissent; it doesn’t suppress it. It thinks through; it doesn’t shout down. Its thought-generating sayings celebrate the one thing that we alone can do — the one thing that we alone must do: Think for ourselves.

In his essay “A Defense of Poetry,” English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote, “The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature.”

The cultivation of aphorisms is never more to be desired than right now, at a period when we have an excess of selfish calculation and a shortage of principles; when the accumulation of quick tech fixes and thought-terminating clichés threaten the laws of human nature. The lies of politicians, the rage posts of online trolls, the trite sound bites of social media influencers — all are trying to make things that are supposed to be difficult seem easy.

Aphorisms are the opposite of that. Aphorisms deliver the short sharp shock of a shunned or forgotten truth. They make us think twice, think differently, think for ourselves. They gleefully increase our cognitive loads, not decrease them. They exist not to help us seem like we know what we’re doing with our lives, but to help us actually know what we’re doing.

If you really want to know what you’re doing, you need gnomes.

At a time of information disruption, social disunity, and political crisis, the aphorism is the most incisive and least divisive ism that we have.

The mind being full, the whole universe is filled with the juice of nectar; the whole earth is covered with leather to him who has put his foot in the shoe.

I once stayed in a hotel in Vienna, one of those self-­consciously designed establishments with backlit photos embedded in the walls and tubes of blue, red, and yellow light placed strategically around every common space. My room had a soft blue light in it, a queasy kind of light that made me jet-­lagged just looking at it. The desk in my room had a glass plate in the top, under which were four red jalapeño peppers. It took me five minutes to figure out how to turn on the shower.

Another thing the hotel had was aphorisms.

There was one on the wall of the lobby as I walked in, from Polish actor Ryszard Cieslak:

We play roles in life to such an extent that all we would have to do is stop playing to create theater.

Signaling the presiding spirit of a place through the strategic placement of an aphorism is an ancient tradition. Those consulting the oracle at Delphi read “Know thyself ” above the entrance to the Temple of Apollo. Montaigne had aphorisms carved into the beams of his study. Years ago during a sailing trip through the Netherlands, when I was just learning Dutch, I saw Elke morgen, nieuwe zorgen (Every morning, new worries) hung above the front door of a house.

After years of subsidence necessitated the repair and redecoration of much of our house, we painted an abbreviated line from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden on the steps to the bathroom. It’s the first thing we see after waking up and walking out the bedroom door:

Morning is when the dawn is within me.

So imagine my delight when, sipping apple juice the next morning during breakfast at the hotel, I discovered the following saying from Thoreau on the paper doily under my glass:

Water is the only drink for a wise man.

Realizing that I was surrounded by aphorisms, I went looking for them. I found Ralph Waldo Emerson on the Do Not Disturb sign on the door handle:

My hours are peaceful centuries.

­and Saint Augustine on the cover of the hotel directory:

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.

This immersive aphoristic experience got me thinking about which sayings I would choose if I had to place one on each of the objects in my house. On my earbuds, T.S. Eliot would be apt:

We are the music while the music lasts.

On my bookshelves, Arthur Schopenhauer:

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

And on a Post-­it note permanently affixed to my forehead:

Writing is thinking.