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All Aphorisms, All The Time
More Aphorisms by Ninus Nestorović
October 5, 2025
I first blogged about the aphorisms of Ninus Nestorović back in December of 2007. Ninus was recently in touch with some new aphorisms, deftly translated by his 15-year-old daughter, Tea. Ninus is a journalist, satirist, and ex-professional footballer who lives in Novi Sad, Serbia. These sayings come from his book 11:52. In an email accompanying the aphorisms, Ninus wrote he believed I would like them — and I do!
To hide from the truth, a person need not stand behind the television, but in front of it.
The poor will leave their children everything they don’t have.
With clean hands you preserve health; with dirty hands, authority.
My city has more churches than hospitals. Were there a God, the numbers would be reversed.
Were the eyes nearer the heart than the mind we’d see differently.
Translated from Serbian into English by Tea Nestorović.
Recent
More Aphorisms by Ninus Nestorović
October 5, 2025
I first blogged about the aphorisms of Ninus Nestorović back in December of 2007. Ninus was recently in touch with some new aphorisms, deftly translated by his 15-year-old daughter, Tea. Ninus is a journalist, satirist, and ex-professional footballer who lives in Novi Sad, Serbia. These sayings come from his book 11:52. In an email accompanying […]
Ashleigh Brilliant (1933–2025)
October 4, 2025
Ashleigh Brilliant, the prolific creator of the drawings-aphorisms he called “Pot-Shots”, died last month in in Santa Barbara, CA. This New York Times obit has a nice summary of his writing career and a selection of some of his best sayings. A piece in the local Santa Barbara outlet Noozhawk has more detailed information on […]
Irving Weiss (1921-2021)
July 10, 2021
Writer, teacher and translator Irving Weiss passed away on June 13. We have Irving to thank for bringing the aphorisms of Malcolm de Chazal into English. Malcolm de Chazal (Geary’s Guide, pp. 359–361) was an aphorist and painter from Mauritius. I discovered the 1979 Sun edition of Chazal’s aphorisms, Sens-Plastique, by chance in a used […]
Wit’s End World* Tour
December 7, 2019
The Wit’s End World* Tour is winding down, but here’s a little visual retrospective of the places I’ve been and the people I’ve met. My thanks to all the booksellers, bookshops, festivals, and organizers of these events—and especially to everyone who turned out to talk about wit. (* By ‘World’, of course I mean the […]
The Summer of Wit
July 26, 2019
Check out Wit’s End live at these summer (and early fall) book festivals… Printers Row Lit Fest June 8, 2019 Chicago, IL Bookstock July 26, 2019 Woodstock, VT Chautauqua Institution July 31, 2019 Chautauqua, NY Decatur Book Festival August 30-September 1, 2019 Decatur, GA Harbor Springs Festival of the Book September 27-29, 2019 Harbor Springs, […]
Wit’s End
October 26, 2018
My new book—Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It—is out on Nov. 13. The book, of course, makes the perfect holiday gift for that special (please select one) A) wit B) nitwit C) dimwit D) half-wit in your life. You can pre-order at Amazon, B&N or Indiebound. But Wit’s […]
Aphorisms by Simon Constam
June 30, 2018
Attending a reading by Terrance Hayes at the Harvard Book Store the other day, I happened to sit next to Simon Constam. We happened to get to talking, and we happened to discover that we both write and read aphorisms. As Simon said, “the odds are astronomical against two people interested in aphorisms just happening to […]
When A Pear Is A Pair
June 18, 2018
Ambiguous figures and visual puns have long been a source of popular entertainment. In 1830s England, publishers came up with a printing technique that allowed them to create illustrations with double meanings. One view is seen when the image is illuminated from the front and a different view is seen when the image is illuminated […]
Visual Wit and Ambiguous Figures
June 17, 2018
At the Boston MFA a few weeks back, I was delighted to discover some Mott the Hoople and Ian Hunter album covers—as well as an explanatory note from Ian Hunter himself—among the works in the show about M.C. Escher. Hunter is an Escher fan and used images from his works for the first Mott album […]
Aphorisms by David Lazar
May 27, 2018
Delighted to welcome back Jim Finnegan, proprietor of the ursprache blog and author of the aphoristically amazing Tramp Freighter, to ‘All Aphorisms, All the Time’ with this guest post… I would not skip the essays in David Lazar’s I’ll Be Your Mirror: Essays & Aphorisms (University of Nebraska Press, 2017). They’re great reading. But allow […]
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