Aphorisms

Michael Castro calls Sephardic proverbs “the unwritten laws of how to be and how to see”, and a better definition of aphoristic expressions I have not seen. Castro has been collecting these proverbs for years, from books, from friends, from relatives. They are featured in Sephardic Proverbs in Big Bridge (Vol 3, No 3), where Castro writes: “For Sephardic Jews, scattered in insular communities throughout the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and Europe, after the century of persecution and Inquisition that culminated in their expulsion from Spain or Sepharad in 1492, proverbs were an important means of passing on and reinforcing values and identity.” This is, in fact, the function of aphoristic expressions in all places, at all times, and Sephardic proverbs make particularly rich reading… My thanks to the ever aphoristically alert Jim Finnegan (check out his blog, ursprache) for bringing my attention to this unique strand of proverbial literature.

Just let me in and I’ll make my own space.

Do something when you are able, not when you want to.

He who has no home is neighbor to the entire world.

It’s better to be the tail of a lion than the head of a rat.
(Compare Lucifer’s retort in Paradise Lost: I would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.)

He who bows down too low exposes his ass.

A closed mouth, flies cannot enter.

Whoever falls, feels.

Aphorisms are everywhere, not just in books but carved into buildings and monuments, scrawled on bathroom walls, slapped onto car bumpers and emblazoned across t-shirts and baseball caps—and they are branded onto the skin. In The Word Made Flesh, a piece on literary tattoos that’s part of the Forbes.com special report on Aphorisms, Proverbs, Thoughts and Sayings, Mark Lewis writes: “You need not be a celebrity [like Angelina Jolie] to have your exposed skin admired on the Internet. The hoi polloi can share images of their literary tattoos with Toronto photographer Jen Grantham, who displays them on her blog, Contrariwise.org.”

Contrariwise is worth a look/read for some of the words of wisdom made flesh there, including the mordantly defiant and utterly inspirational:

Defy gravity

which is Kat’s tattoo, from the play Wicked, which she says she wanted “from the moment the show let out, as a reminder to just go for it in life and not let anyone or anything hold me down.”

Then there is Stellar’s tattoo, an even darker take on the defying gravity theme, from Rilke’s Duino Elegies:

Be ahead of all departure.

And then there is the simple word “Unless”, tattooed on the forearm as a reminder of the Dr. Seuss line from The Lorax:

UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.

Bertie Charles Forbes, the man who founded the magazine that bears his name, was also a life-long collector of aphorisms. He gave “Thoughts on the Business of Life”—a smattering of thoughtful quotations—a full page in every issue of the magazine, he said, “to inspire a philosophic mode of life, broad sympathies, charity towards all.” In the introduction to Thoughts on the Business of Life, which now totals some 10,000 sayings, Forbes wrote that he wanted to “have done something towards bequeathing a better world for my four sons and an increasing number of grandchildren.” That motivation puts him in a long line of moralist-aphorists that started with the local Egyptian potentate Ptah-Hotep back in the third millennium BCE…

Forbes.com has just put Thoughts on the Business of Life online, accompanied by a clutch of essays on Aphorisms, Proverbs, Thoughts and Sayings. This special report includes reflections by Karl Shmavonian, the editor of Forbes‘ quotes page; a piece on how sayings evolve by Brian Burrell; a friendly warning to misquoters from Nigel Rees; an anatomy of proverbs by Wolfgang Mieder; a primer on online quotation sleuthing by Fred R. Shapiro; a piece on literary tattoos by Mark Lewis; and a consideration of aphorisms and the Forbes family by me.

Bertie Charles and Malcolm Forbes are part of a small group of aphorists for whom a talent for the form has run in the family. There are only a few other examples of aphoristic family trees. “Fireside Poet” Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. passed on some aphoristic genes to his son, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who was a U.S. Supreme Court justice. And, of course, the Roosevelts—President Theodore, First Lady Eleanor (Theodore’s niece) and U.S. President Franklin Delano (Eleanor’s distant cousin and husband)—were consistently aphoristic. The aphorisms of Bertie Charles Forbes tend to be moralistic and civic-minded:

Better to be occasionally cheated than perpetually suspicious.

Those of his son, Malcolm, are more philosophical, even Zen-like:

When you catch what you’re after, it’s gone.

The aphorisms of both men, though, remind us why this intimate, idiosyncratic form is so special. If you’re in search of more reminders, check out Thoughts on the Business of Life.

Every polished surface conceals a mirror. Whatever shines—the blade of a knife, the curve of another person’s eye—is intent on reflection. Desperate for attention, these things seem to think the best way to get it is to display us to ourselves. Why else would images gather wherever water stops to collect itself? Why else would windows, meant to be transparent, show us pictures of ourselves looking through them? Mirrors are untrustworthy because each one presents a slightly different perspective. They may feign objectivity, but they really can’t resist giving an opinion, playing up imperfections and blemishes, grotesquely magnifying things or cruelly diminishing them. And we can’t resist looking, even though you can never argue with a mirror. It just throws your own words back at you.

A loose thread protruding from my favorite sweater. So this is what everything hangs by, this is what holds it all together. A thread can never relax; it shrivels if you cut it too much slack. Tension is the only thing that gives it shape, purpose. It gladly bears the stress even as it starts to fray around the edges. Once shorn from its pattern, though, a thread becomes lost, distraught, useless as a snapped violin string, a coil of old rope. This no doubt explains a thread’s tenacity, knowing how quickly things unravel, that clinging is its only strength.

A version of this abbreviated essay appears in the June-July issue of Ode.

Oleg Vishnepolsky was one of the early technologists and researchers at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center in the 1980s, and was thus present at the creation of some of the critical advances that made the Internet possible. Some of his sayings come out of his corporate experience: “Good project management is building a novel out of a bunch of short stories.” Vishnepolsky’s father was an editor at Pravda; his mother a professor of the arts. Despite his choice of a technical career, Vishnepolsky retained a love for art, journalism, poetry, and aphorisms. A selection of his own:

A choice is the only thing you kill by making it.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you create an environmental problem.

Small actions beat big intentions.

A relationship that lasts is built not on a win-win but on a sacrifice-sacrifice.

A relationship is an hourglass; sometimes, you have to turn it upside down to get it going again.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around, the firewood is yours for the taking.

A joke is a soap bar; it gets thinner with use.

If you bump into a devil you do not know, quickly introduce yourself.

The last person into an elevator is the first person out.

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