Aphorisms

Serbian aphorist Aleksander Cotric (see p. 30 of Geary’s Guide) is back with some Forbidden Thoughts, his new collection of aphorisms. Fellow Serbian aphorist Aleksandar Baljak says Cotric “securely occupies the pinnacle of Serbian satirical literature.” That’s surely correct; these sharp sayings are not for the faint-hearted… Cotric’s aphorisms can also be found in Serbia’s Secret Weapon, a collection of Serbian anti-war aphorisms (which seems to have taken its title from one of the aphorisms below) compiled by Slobodan Simi?. He is also featured in Boris Mitic’s delightful documentary about the Belgrade Aphoristic Circle, Goodbye, How Are You? The aphorisms below were translated into English by Mirjana N. Mataric (with occasional editing by me).

Our country is in transition: It is disappearing from the map.

Nothing should slow us down; that’s why we have not opened our parachutes.

Our destiny would have been in our hands but we didn’t want to get them dirty.

Hatred cannot explode from us; it is too deep.

We are using our heads—to break the wall.

Nobody knows anything; that’s our secret weapon.

Mica M. Tumaric comes from the anarchic, acerbic, antic aphoristic alembic that is the Balkans. Born in Novi Sad in 1949, he is a journalist by profession and, like most of his fellow Serbian aphorists, a satirist by vocation. His work has been translated into English, Russian, Hungarian, Romanian, Ruthenian, Slovak, Macedonian and Bulgarian, among other languages.

If you had to pay for stupidity, many would go bankrupt.

After all the doors opened, we were left with a draft.

The hungry have had their fill of promises.

He’s in great shape; he keeps running from the truth.

We struggled to gain freedom of speech; now we can’t get a word in edgewise.

Patricie Hole?ková is a Czech aphorist. Born in Slovakia, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kracow and has lived in the Czech Republic since 1982. Her aphorisms first appeared in the Czech anthology A Good Word Never Cuts to The Quick (2004). Her first collection, Aphorisms (Oftis), was published in 2005 and this year a new collection, Without Many Words, is due out. For more aphorisms, go to Patricie Hole?ková’s website.

I prefer the living thoughts of the dead as opposed to the dead thoughts of the living.

He who doesn’t have ideals idealizes whatever he has.

Some people have so much self-confidence that they can’t even be flattered.

We flatter ourselves the most when we say that we value sincerity more than flattery

Those who don’t pretend they’re smarter think they’re smarter.

A big mistake is to overlook the small one.

Only in disappointment do we realize how big our hopes were.

Young people have illusions about the future, old people about the past.

Jim Finnegan, proprietor of the ursprache blog, has done it again. He’s found yet another obscure yet fascinating aphorist, as he explains here:

“At a church book sale, I found a lovely little book—Bits of Philosophy: From The Letters and Journal of Anna Firth Ferguson (Concord, Mass.,1933)—written by a woman who lived much like Thoreau at Walden Pond; simply, close to nature, and with a similar urge to compose aphoristic and philosophic writings. From three short accounts of her life and ways, written by her friends in what looks to be a posthumously and privately printed book, I’m given to understand that Anna Fitch studied art in Boston, but early on left both Boston and the formal study of art. She had a cottage built near Concord, Mass, and there she gardened, raised vegetables and wrote. In 1902, she was married to Edwin Ferguson, a man of ‘delicate health’. Mr. Ferguson was a cleric, and after marrying they lived for a time in Washington state where he served a parish. However, after a short period in what was rugged country at the time, Edwin and Anna were forced by reason of his health to move to Colorado. There she bore a son. But in only the fourth year of their marriage, Edwin passed away, and Anna returned to Concord to live with her son in her cottage. In that cottage, which came to be called “Peace Cottage,” she spent the remainder of her life. A selection of the aphorisms:”

We give by being. One cannot give much until he becomes much.

One cannot take mental pictures of another without giving us a view of himself.

A condition for interchange is inter-need.

It is more difficult to live poetry than to write it.

We cannot find peace by building a floor over unanswered questions and living upon it.

A good moment appreciated comes again.

Better than a teacher is a desire to learn.

The first step towards knowing a thing is not knowing it.

We have left much rubbish at the door of truth, but none has got inside.

Daniel Liebert (see pp. 292–293 of Geary’s Guide) is back with some new aphorisms. But not just any aphorisms; these are his own take on Ramon Gomez de la Serna’s greguerias. “As far as I’ve been able to ascertain,” Dan writes, “I am the world’s only writer of greguerias.” Dan defines greguerias as combining “aphoristic assertiveness, the punchline ‘kick’ of a one-liner joke, and the child-like delight in metaphor.” These and other of Liebert’s aphorisms are forthcoming in Fraglit, edited by Olivia Dresher.

Radio static is the lint of sound.

The high-diver pauses a moment to wind the spring in his buttocks.

A nun’s wimple is a bandage where her face was scissored from life.

Life evaporates and leaves memory salt.

Moths are shadows breaded with dust.

My morning piss hoses down the boulevards of sleep.

A stopped clock has arrived.

Lipstick on my cheek is the passport stamp at the border of Family.

Along with Malcolm de Chazal, Ramon Gomez de la Serna is one of the weirdest and most wonderful (and most woefully neglected) aphorists in the entire history of the form. Gomez de la Serna (see pages 370-371 of Geary’s Guide) died in the early 1960s, having written dozens of books and hundreds of so-called “greguerias“—his own peculiar form of the aphorism. A while back, Laurie-Anne Laget, a professor at France’s Sorbonne, discovered a cache of unpublished greguerias in some boxes deposited at the University of Pittsburgh by the writer’s widow in 1970. This article from the Latin American Herald Tribune tells the story, though sadly it does not name the book in which the new aphorisms appear: 400 Unpublished Gomez de la Serna Aphorisms Come to Light. (If anyone can track the title down, please leave a comment on this post!) Here are a few of Gomez de la Serna’s long-lost sayings… Once again, I thank the ever aphoristically alert Jim Finnegan (check out his blog, ursprache) for bringing this find to my attention.

Words are the skeleton of things and for that reason last longer than things do.

The water lily is a flower that escaped from the trees to navigate the waters.

Capitalist: a gymnast with many telephones.

An ironing board wears a striped undershirt.

Octopi are the gloves of the sea.

What does the moon do in a pond? It washes its face.

Sabahudin Hadžiali? is another Balkan aphorist and also deputy editor-in-chief of the online satirical weekly Zikison. Like many Balkan aphorists, Hadžiali? works as a journalist. In 2009, Hadžiali? published a book of aphorisms, satirical dramas, and short stories called Abecedna Azbuka. Balkan aphorisms tend to be blunt rather than surgically sharp, so that when the blade of satire passes through your mind it leaves a rough and jagged path in its wake, a path that is immediately covered over with a kind of oozing black humor.

There is only one life, but you die many times.

Forbidden fruit is sweetest, but it very rarely ripens.

Great pain is mute.

Human beings are like rivers: pure at the source and dirty at the mouth.

Zoran Matic Mazos hails from Serbia, which has to be the geographic location with the highest per capita proportion of active aphorists in the world, perhaps because the political situation there has been so ripe for aphorisms for so long. Mazos, a graphic designer by profession and a cartoonist by vocation, writes a form of political satirical aphorism currently being perfected in that part of the world. He is founder and editor-in-chief of the electronic weekly for political satire, humor, cartoons and comics Zikison.

What good is it to see future when we can’t change it?

To avoid a misdeed; that is a heroic deed!

Our blood starts to flow when our ideas dry up.

‘Solomon Slade’ is the pseudonym of an aphorist who has penned three hundred sayings (Solomon’s 300, Maxims for the 21st Century) as a gift for family and friends this Christmas. Giving aphorisms as gifts is a dangerous business, since the wise words themselves are not always so festive. But Slade’s sayings come from a very generous spirit, though Solomon is not the first aphorist who comes to mind when reading them. These are more the observations of a suburban La Rochefoucauld—meditations on marriage, sex, politics, house pets, backyards, etc… that address the big existential questions that crack domestic routine like crabgrass through a sidewalk. There is also the occasional surreal touch, a Ramon Gomez de la Serna-like ability to spot the macabre in the mundane. Mr. Slade says he uses a pseudonym as “a way to deflect criticism.” He should be more worried about it deflecting praise.

Losing a great love is an eternal regret—and often a great relief.

The innocent can’t account for their whereabouts nearly as well as the guilty.

The best advice is a bad example.

Charity is a vampire with sugared fangs.

People with dogs at home know a hero’s welcome on a daily basis.

Immortality doesn’t last as long as it used to.

Words and tornadoes are made of the same thing and can be equally destructive.

Most people praise monogamy for moral reasons, but they practice it for financial ones.

A good lover makes a good breakfast.

The sounds leading up to vomiting and those leading up to an election are equally disgusting.

Getting naked is sexier than being naked.

Shallow water and shallow people are most easily agitated.

All men become rakes when they try on a hat.

No speech can be good enough to distract from a speaker’s unzipped fly.

A philosophy should be able to fit into one sentence. Perhaps two.

Bo Fowler loves aphorisms; he fiddled with the form in college, penning his own sayings on transparent strips of paper and leaving them inside crusty books in the university library; and aphorisms helped him woo his wife-to-be. Fowler is also the author of the novel, Scepticism Inc. He says he “intends to write one hundred novels and then die.” All this information comes from a letter included with a copy of Notes from the Autopsy of God, a compact collection of more than 1,500 of Fowler’s fulsome and funny fulminations against faith. Fowler follows in the footsteps of antithetical, anti-theological philosophers like Nietzsche, though the potshots he takes at God are generally quite genial. Yes, life can seem quite meaningless, and there’s nowhere we go after we die, but here are some interesting things to think about in the meantime.

When we measure time we only waste it.

Thank God prayers are not answered.

What a monumental effort it would take to leave no trace at all.

We volunteer for our destinies unaware.

The normal is just the alien grown accustomed to us.

Never settle for contentment.

Believe in your doubts.