Welles Reymond published a little book called Words & Feelings, Chuckles & Tears. It is a little book; the format is slightly smaller than your average credit card. The aphorisms in the book are almost all about romantic love, a subject most aphorists find difficult to address in other than cynical or suspicious terms. Reymond’s tone is often melancholic, even rueful. There is a sense of ‘if I knew then what I know now…’ throughout, as evidenced by the very last aphorism in the book:

I wish I had read these epigrams before I had to write them.

Still, the bitter wisdom of the book is leavened by regular eruptions of humor, the chuckles alluded to in the title. A selection of Reymond’s other sayings:

Slings and arrows are boomerangs.

When you worry about whether it’s over or not, it is.

Looking back at love lost is like turning your back on a sunrise.

“Legend has it that Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in only six words. His response? ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ Last year, SMITH Magazine re-ignited the recountre by asking our readers for their own six-word memoirs. They sent in short life stories in droves, from the bittersweet (’Cursed with cancer, blessed with friends’) and poignant (’I still make coffee for two’) to the inspirational (’Business school? Bah! Pop music? Hurrah’) and hilarious (’I like big butts, can’t lie’).”

This is the introduction to the Six-Word Memoirs section of Smith, an online magazine designed “to be a place for storytelling, with a focus on personal narrative.” These six-word memoirs make fascinating and compulsive reading. Smith does not refer to the pieces as aphorisms, but the most moving and insightful of them are indeed aphorisms. They are great examples of the ability of the aphorism to compact so much—an entire life even—into so few words. The six-word memoirs are the bonsai trees of autobiographical writing: constrained by their miniature containers, these reflections are all the more powerful for forcing all of their blossoms into such a tiny space. Reading them, you get a very clear and poignant sense of the life behind the writing, sometimes funny, sometimes bitter, sometimes tragic. I’ll say no more. Read for yourself:

Bad beginning makes ending look good.

A smile can change a life…

Never underestimate the power of snuggling.

Born, published, now out of print.

Life-reflected in my sons’ eyes.

Not worth even six words.

Samuel Arthur Bent was an author, lawyer and editor of a delightful anthology of quotations called Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men. First published in 1882, the book is arranged alphabetically by writer and is absolutely crammed with aphorisms, anecdotes and biographical tidbits. Bent even includes parallel lines, in which he lists similar sayings by other “great men.” Bent’s selections and editorial remarks can seem stodgy to the 21st century reader, but his brilliance, erudition and eccentricity are evident throughout. And despite the sexism of the title, Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men features plenty of female aphorists, such as Madame du Deffand, an 18th-century French wit, salon hostess, and friend of Voltaire and d’Alembert. Bent recounts the story of one Cardinal de Polignac, who described to Madame du Deffand the martyrdom of Saint Denis at Montmartre and how, after his decapitation, the freshly minted martyr walked all the way to the distant village where a cathedral was built in his name holding his severed head in his hands, whereupon Madame du Deffand replied:

The distance is nothing; it is only the first step that costs.

Bent also tells the story of a certain Sir Hercules who, when asked if he had polished off three bottles of port without assistance, replied: “Not quite: I had the assistance of a bottle of Madeira.” Bent died in 1912, after collapsing in the lobby of a Boston hotel. You can download his obituary from the New YorkTimes. Some sayings via Bent to keep you on the straight and narrow:

Religion converts despair, which destroys, into resignation, which submits. —Lady Blessington

Go on, and the light will come to you. —Jean D’Alembert

Flowers are the sweetest things that God ever made, and forgot to put a soul into. —Henry Ward Beecher

So order your affairs as if you were to live long, or die soon. —Bias

Be old when young, that you may be young when old. —Richard Whately

Tears leave the body at a temperature of 98.6 degrees. It is difficult to experience this from the tear rolling down your own cheek. But stand close to someone who is weeping, let a drop fall onto your arm, your wrist, and you feel the sudden heat immediately. We are, in fact, continually weeping. The eyes are bathed in tears that protect, cleanse, lubricate. Crying anoints the cornea in holy oils, keeps the lens bright, rinses dust from the eyes. This veil of tears is anatomically correct. Tears always appear at the extremes, greasing the joints between pleasure and pain. Unlike grief, tears have extraordinarily short half-lives. No sooner are they shed than they begin to fade, evaporate, to disappear. “Nothing dries sooner than a tear,” Benjamin Franklin once observed. Which is why we all have an endless supply.

This abbreviated essay originally appeared in the March issue of Ode, on sale now.

Anthony W. Shipps wrote a book called The Quote Sleuth, which contains tips on “the tools and methods used in the identification of the sources of quotations” and is really the definitive work for anyone serious about tracking down the correct attributions for all kinds of sayings. The book is an exhaustive how-to guide for tracers of lost quotations, and Shipps includes lots of examples of puzzling quotations and how he managed, with a lot of persistence and ingenuity, to finally pinpoint their original sources. Towards the end of the book, Shipps lists some axioms for would-be quote sleuths that occasionally approach the aphoristic and which I hereby excerpt:

Time spent looking for quotations is never wasted.

The Oxford English Dictionary is a book of quotations.

You should get ready for quotation problems long before they happen.

Solutions that you cannot find sometimes find you.

Vasil Tolevski is from Macedonia, where he has already published an anthology of Montenegran and Serbian aphorisms and is preparing an anthology of Macedonian aphorisms. Like his fellow Balkan aphorists, Tolevski’s sayings are darkly satirical, with a fierce cynicism about politics and politicians. Most of the political disputes in the region involve Balkan nations arguing (or fighting) amongst themselves. Macedonia, however, has an additional squabble with Greece, over who has the right to the name “Macedonia.” Some of Tolevski’s grimly humorous reflections on the state of his nation:

Without people, whips would be useless.

The Devil has gone; even he couldn’t stand this hell.

They promised to pursue justice and they kept their word: They pursued it right out of the country.

The first sign that you have sunk to the bottom is when everyone around you is as silent as fish.

In politics, ecology is observed: Political wastes are always recycled.

Mina Loy always considered herself more of a visual rather than a verbal artist. She was born in London in 1882, and first established a reputation as a post-Impressionist painter. She lived in Paris during the early years of the 20th century and was involved in all of the artistic movements of the time: dadaism, futurism, surrealism. She moved to the U.S. in 1916, and in 1921 Ezra Pound wrote to Marianne Moore, editor of Poetry magazine: “Is there anyone in America except you, Bill [William Carlos Williams] and Mina Loy who can write anything of interest in verse?” One of Loy’s verses, “Aphorisms on Futurism,” is an aphorism sequence as much as it is a poem. My thanks Lori Ellison for alerting me to Mina Loy. Excerpted aphorisms:

THE velocity of velocities arrives in starting.

LOVE the hideous to find the sublime core of it.

LOVE of others is an appreciation of one’s self.

MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.

TIME is the dispersion of intensiveness.

THE Futurist can live a thousand years in one poem.

Do aphorisms proselytize? I suppose they do, but in a uniquely non-dogmatic way. They raise more questions than they answer. If anything, they undermine faith—faith in a particular political philosophy, faith in a football team, faith in human nature in general, faith in yourself in particular, faith in a god—rather than support it. And they often do that through humor, the best antidote for excessive certainty. Even someone as serious as Aristotle recognized the importance of jokes:

Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.

Often, things are not always as copasetic as they seem, and an aphorism can help restore your faith—faith in a particular political philosophy, faith in a football team, etc…—by challenging it. Any faith that does not welcome, and cannot withstand, a challenge is not much of a faith at all. My favorite aphorism on the subject is by the always-challenging Karl Kraus:

It is an enigma to me how a theologian can be praised because he has struggled his way to unbelief. The achievement that always struck me as most heroic and praiseworthy was struggling through to belief.

In that spirit, here’s some more fun with faith-based aphorisms:

Drive through any small town or suburb in America and you’ll see them: the signposts outside churches and other places of worship advertising the next service or sporting some verse from the Bible.

Some churches seem to be getting into the aphorism business, at least judging by these aphoristic snapshots sent to me courtesy of Joseph F. Conte.

Read these, and be redeemed:

I’m indebted to my cousin, Matt, for sending me a sample copy of Bits & Pieces, “the magazine that motivates the world.” It’s a peculiar publication: a tiny pamphlet, just 24 pages, with nothing but quotations, aphorisms and inspirational stories in it, kind of like Reader’s Digest’s “Quotable Quotes” in booklet form. Bits & Pieces is published by Ragan’s Motivational Resources, whose publications are, according to the company website, “designed to bring you hope, lift your spirits, and encourage you to stretch toward your potential.” The authors are a mix of celebrities, writers and business executives, most of whom I had never heard of before. Some bits and pieces I found uplifting:

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. —Susan Ertz

Truce is better than friction. —Charles Herguth

There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do. —Freya Madeline Stark

Worry is a misuse of the imagination. —Dan Zadra

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you. —Ralph Waldo Emerson