Mardy Grothe describes Metaphors Be with You, his new book, as “a museum of quotations” but, thanks to his innovative use of QR codes linked to an online database, the book is a living, breathing museum of metaphorical masterpieces all language lovers will want to explore. In the book, Mardy selected “The Ten Best Things Ever Said” on 250 topics. He then used the QR Codes to link each of the 250 topics to its corresponding section in Dr. Mardy’s Dictionary of Metaphorical Quotations (DMDMQ), an online database of metaphorical quotations. Scan a QR code with your phone and you’ll find source information, additional quotations, and other resources for the methodically metaphorically minded. Thus, the database can continue to grow and evolve as a complement to and extension of the print book.

Predictably, I chose the topic ‘aphorism’ to illustrate Mardy’s method. But metaphoriacs will find much else to celebrate and discover here…

Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. —W.H. Auden

How many of us have been incited to reason, have learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life by some dazzling aphorism. —Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

Aphorisms give you more for your time and money than any other literary form. Only the poem comes near to it, but then most good poems either start off from an aphorism or arrive at one. —Louis Dudek

An aphorism is the last link in a long chain of thought. —Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Aphorisms are literature’s hand luggage. Light and compact, they fit easily into the overhead compartment of your brain —James Geary

The aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general. —Stefan Kanfer

An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half. —Karl Kraus

Certain brief sentences are peerless in their ability to give one the feeling that nothing remains to be said. —Jean Rostand

Aphorisms are salted and not sugared almonds at Reason’s feast. —Logan Pearsall-Smith

An aphorism is a one-line novel. —Leonid Sukhorukov