Aphorisms

Logan Pearsall Smith (Geary’s Guide pp. 173–174) described aphorisms as “x-rays of observation.” His father was an evangelical Quaker and his mother a best-selling author of inspirational literature, so it’s no wonder the young Logan Pearsall became an obsessive collector of aphorisms. He specialized in English–language aphorists, compiling an important anthology and writing monographs about unjustly neglected practitioners of the form. Although an American, Smith lived almost his entire adult life in London, where he became known as an essayist and critic. As a young man in Philadelphia, he knew Walt Whitman, from nearby Camden, New Jersey. One of his sisters married Bertrand Russell (GG p. 346), and Smith once employed Cyril Connolly (GG pp. 29–30) as an assistant. Smith wrote what is, for me, one of the all-time great aphorisms:

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Though his aphoristic output was small, there are a relatively high rate of keepers, such these, culled from a recent reading of All Trivia:

Aphorisms are salted and not sugared almonds at Reason’s feast.

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.

A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.

If you are losing your leisure, look out! You may be losing your soul.

The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work on the proceeds, is the most familiar of all the devil’s traps for artists.

How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true!

Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament.

I said in my previous post that Edward Bulwer–Lytton was a pretty respectable aphorist but failed to give any examples of his aphoristic respectability. I do so here. Surprisingly, perhaps, in addition to composing what has come to be universally regarded as the most awful opening line of any novel ever written, Bulwer–Lytton is also credited with composing some of the best phrases in the English language, including “the pen is mightier than the sword,” “the great unwashed” and the “pursuit of the almighty dollar.” For more aphorisms, see pp. 184-186 of Geary’s Guide.

One of the surest evidences of friendship that one individual can display to another is telling him gently of a fault. If any other can excel it, it is listening to such a disclosure with gratitude, and amending the error.

You believe that easily which you hope for earnestly.

The easiest person to deceive is one’s self.

Talent does what it can; genius does what it must.

As the Trekkies among you will know, the Ferengi are an alien race inhabiting the universe of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The name Ferengi is apparently derived from the Arabic word for European traders, or Westerners in general. The Ferengi are consummate businesspeople—in fact, they believe that money, or at least economic exchange, really does make the worlds go around—and they devised an aphoristic handbook called the Rules of Acquisition that outlines the fundamental principles for Ferengi business dealings. The rules are appropriately pragmatic:

War is good for business.

Peace is good for business.

This kind of opportunism likely won’t win you many friends, but it certainly influences people. The Rules of Acquisition are refreshingly utilitarian. Even though they come across as unpalatable, well, truth usually is. It’s helpful to be reminded of this, especially during troubled economic times. Despite their extraterrestrial origin, the Ferengi aphorisms are not out of this world but very much of it.

Opportunity plus instinct equals profit.

Greed is eternal.

Expand or die.

The bigger the smile, the sharper the knife.

Whisper your way to success.

Employees are the rungs on the ladder of success. Don’t hesitate to step on them.

You can’t free a fish from water.

Eino Vastaranta, born in 1967, is a Finnish aphorist who also writes humorous columns, jokes, and haiku. He lives and blogs in Helsinki. Vastaranta’s sayings have that distinctive, uniquely Finnish streak of dark wit, the same kind of gallows humor that characterizes many aphorisms from Central and Eastern Europe. But the Finns are, in general, even bleaker in their assessment of the human race. “When the next Flood comes, I wish the animals pushed Noah overboard,” Vastaranta writes. Yet there is a whiff of mysticism in Vastaranta’s aphorisms, perhaps even a (faint) hope of redemption. And, luckily, they are often funny. My thanks to Sami Feiring for alerting me to Eino Vastaranta’s aphorisms.

Always look from the same viewpoint: a new one.

We don’t believe until we see, and we don’t see once we believe.

Human being, inhuman doing.

I can’t see the forest for the cut-down trees.

Search and you shall find—yourself, searching.

You cannot get rid of your roots until you are six feet under.

You can have the last word. Then it’s my turn.

The latest issue of the excellent FragLit Magazine is out and it includes aphorisms by Georges Perros and Marty Rubin; the latter being an alum of this blog. FragLit is edited by Olivia Dresher, an accomplished aphorist herself. Of Perros, FragLt writes: “Papiers collés (Paper Collage, 1960, 1973, 1978), the three-volume notebook written by Georges Perros (1923-1978) and published by Gallimard, continues to enjoy a cult status among French readers because of the author’s sardonic maxims, vignettes, short prose narratives, and philosophical remarks. Excerpts are translated here for the first time in English by John Taylor.” Some Perros aphorisms:

Once we have learned the answer, we often say: that’s what I thought. Thinking is perhaps this.

Life is every now and then.

Here is the full FragLit selection of Perros aphorisms.

Marty Rubin’s aphorisms continue to be whimsical, witty, and wise:

Between thoughts, travel far and wide.

Writing is talking to yourself—with the hope of being overheard.

When you look into things you see things that aren’t there.

Here’s the full Fraglit selection of Rubin aphorisms, Out of Context.

Four of my Assays, abbreviated aphoristic essays, appear in this issue, too.

In the poem/essay Why Aphorisms?, Stephen Coltin writes:

In matters of the highest importance,
only fools are edified by exposition.
Philosophers (if I might be permitted
to amend Samuel Johnson’s aphorism),
“need to be reminded, more often
than they need to be instructed.”

Sami Feiring is a Finnish aphorist, a teacher of aphoristic technique, president of the Aphorism Association of Finland since 2005, and a founding member of World Aphorism Organization. He curates the Finnish Aphorism site, where a selection of Finnish aphorisms is available in translation in several languages. He also compiled an index to Geary’s Guide, in which aphorists can be searched for by country. (You can download the index from Sami’s ‘Modern Gnomologists’ listing on the What Is Gnomology? page.) Sami shares with many of his aphoristic compatriots a focus on social and political issues; a concern for social justice and political rectitude runs through many Finnish aphorisms. And, of course, there is always that tinge of existentialism around the edges. Reading these aphorisms you get the sense that the extraordinary lurks behind the everyday, that a leaky faucet may be a prelude to the Flood…

God rested on the seventh day. Do skeptics get a day off?

Power-hungry politicians eat their words.

Knowledge is power, especially when you conceal it.

The biggest lies come in the most attractive packaging.

When politicians stumble, soldiers fall.

If nature could speak, it would remain silent.

Uniforms are body bags.

The Flood will dry our tears.

If Hell went bankrupt, Heaven would have fewer customers.

Dreaming opens your eyes.

Alfred Kelly alerts me to the aphorisms of the late Mason Cooley, a professor of literature at the College of Staten Island and Columbia University, who died in 2002. There is not a lot of info about Cooley online, but the Cooley listing on poemhunter.com runs to over 200 pages and, by Mr. Kelly’s count, contains some 1,500 sayings. Cooley published a series of collections called City Aphorisms, which seems to have run at least for nine separate “selections.” Wikiquote also has a compact list of Cooleyisms. Cooley has a number of aphorisms on aphorisms, including

In an aphorism, aptness counts for more than truth.

The laughter of the aphorism is sometimes triumphant, but seldom carefree.

Writing an upbeat aphorism is a temptation, but decorum forbids.

A selection of his other sayings follows. My thanks to Alfred Kelly of Hamilton College, one-time academic haunt of the great aphorists Josh Billings and Ezra Pound, for alerting me to Mason Cooley.

Wisdom remembers. Happiness forgets

Reality is the name we give to our disappointments.

The Insignificance of Man is a congenial theme; my own insignificance is a sore point.

Passion impels our deeds; ideology supplies the explanations.

By multiplying ironies, I evade commitments.

Don’t tell me it’s raining when you’re peeing on me!

Nick Piombino is a poet, essayist, psychotherapist, and aphorist. In Contradicta: Aphorisms, he has written sayings that “replicate some aspects of psychoanalysis in which two individual viewpoints are juxtaposed, working together to achieve understanding and insight.” Aphorisms themselves can be considered a kind of reading cure, if not exactly a talking one. Reading a good aphorism is a mini-psychotherapeutic session, in which the aphorism asks you often uncomfortable questions and you have to come up with the answers. Not something to take lying down, but definitely something to make you sit up and look around with a new perspective. The brief selection of aphorisms below is culled from Piombino’s blog; he also tweets. My thanks, as usual, to Jim Finnegan, proprietor of the always enlightening ursprache blog as well as the aphoristically amazing Tramp Freighter, for alerting me to Nick Piombino’s aphorisms.

Even time stops for a moment, to bow, astonished, to real happiness.

The best winners learn much when they lose, the great discoverers are challenged when lost, to know having is to feel deeply when bereft.

If memory is the cake, nostalgia is the icing, the icing that no one can resist licking off their fingers.

Success consists of 1% holding forth and 99% holding back.

You’ve read his oxymorons, you’ve read his parables, and you may well have read a previous selection of his aphorisms (but, alas, I can’t provide a link since that post disappeared in a catastrophic site crash), and now you can read more of Steven Carter’s aphorisms, from his New Aphorisms and Reflections, first and second series. “My own definition of an art form … is that it ought to permanently alter your way of looking at yourself and the world,” Carter writes by way of introduction. “This is a tall order, but it’s happened to me after looking at many Picassos, attending and teaching many plays by Shakespeare, viewing many films by Ingmar Bergman—and, yes, reading many aphorisms by authors like Francois, duc de la Rochefoucauld, Joseph Joubert, Blaise Pascal, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, E.M. Cioran, Karl Kraus, Vilhelm Ekelund, and Fernando Pessoa.” I, of course, couldn’t agree more. So here’s another opportunity to permanently alter your way of looking at yourself and the world…

Not only can you argue with success, you should argue with success—as with an adversary.

Opportunity doesn’t knock. It’s slipped under the door surreptitiously, like a billing statement in a hotel.

Babies are born bald and serious. They know what’s coming.

Language is what happens when love and war fail.

Only aphorisms which famish fill us up.