Piotr Bardzik describes himself as Polish by birth, Maltese by love, European by conviction, and bean counter by profession. He neglects to mention one important biographical detail: aphorist by avocation. Bardzik has channeled what began as regular journal entries into two books of aphorisms, Fa...

“Nothing makes life more complicated than taking the easy way out,” Andrzej Majewski writes in Wisdom for Every Occasion. But in his collection of aphorisms, Majewski, organizer of last year’s International Aphorism Conference in Wroclaw, Poland, provides no easy answers, just plenty of complicat...

Karl Kraus called his aphorisms “prejudices,” “illusions,” or “splinters”; Antonio Porchia, “voices”; Stanisław Jerzy Lec, “trifles”. Colombian aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila designated his sayings escolios, or “glosses,” after the ancient practice of penning notes and commentaries in the margins ...

What is the difference between an aphorism and an epigram? Epigrams usually rhyme, are often funny and cynical, and are often intended to castigate or criticize a rival. When they are also philosophical, they are aphorisms. Martial (Geary’s Guide, pp. 293-294) is the Western author most closely a...

Richard Greene started writing aphorisms after noticing that a line in one of his poems read like an aphorism — a self-contained gnomic utterance. (For a consideration of poems as aphorisms, see my discussion with Neil Denny of Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker, and Samuel Hoffenstein on the Little...