Stacked like logs in the supermarket, next to the paper towels and the laundry detergent, they await burning. Nestled like eggs, each in its own cardboard box, they clasp tiny brittle buds inside fragile translucent shells. Patient and inconspicuous, these wildest of creatures have been easily domesticated. In homes and offices, they take root on desktops, sprout from bedside tables, thriving in the darkest corners. Hanging from ceilings, they are flowering stalactites—one flick of a switch drives the sap through their veins, through pistil and stamen, and they burst into flame. Then there is no controlling them. They immediately speed away, leaving a trail of fire in their wakes. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, one appears above your head. It glows there in the air for a moment, like some startled bird, before splitting open, spilling its brightness everywhere.

A version of this abbreviated essay appeared in the June issue of Ode, on newsstands now.

The moment we’ve all been waiting for has arrived! In fact, it arrived on May 15, when the names of the ten winning aphorists in the German Aphorism Association (DAphA) contest were announced at Germany’s Stadtmuseum Hattingen, home of DAphA. The German aphorism competition is the only one I know of in the world and, though it may sound like an obscure endeavor, this year the jury had to select its favorite aphorisms from more than 1,500 entries penned by more than 300 contributors from all parts of Germany as well as some neighboring countries. That is an astonishing result, and surely makes Hattingen the Cannes of aphorism competitions. For the full story, check out Jurgen Wilbert’s blog on the World Aphorism Association site. For now, here is a selection of the some of the winning sayings (and don’t forget the German Aphorism Association conference from Nov 6–8 in Hattingen):

An aphorist is not stingy with thoughts but with words. —Marita Bagdahn, Bonn

You are working on your weaknesses until they dominate you perfectly. —Helwig Brunner, Graz, Austria

Accidents happen on which the fingerprints of God are still visible. —Nikolaus Cybinski, Lörrach

In a good dialogue, half-truths will not be added together but shared. —Jacques Wirion, Luxemburg

In the long run, no one can live with just one lie; he will certainly need some more. —Wolfgang Mocker, Berlin

Who has not been held up, does not go far. —Frank Rawel, Michendorf

Rifkah Goldberg was born in London in 1950, but has been living in Jerusalem since 1975. A biochemist and a painter, she started writing poetry and presenting it at Jerusalem Poetry Slams in the late 1990s after going through the trauma of a divorce. Her work has appeared in the U.S., England and Israel. In common with many other aphorists, personal trauma led her to an interest in aphorisms, which she has collected in Therapy through Aphorisms. Her aphorisms are refreshingly bleak, offering no quick therapeutic fix for life’s many blemishes and bruises.

The main problem with people is that they are human.

Children inherit their parents’ unfinished business.

You can never have a second first marriage.

There is no end to divorce.

Life is a losing battle.

The tradition of penning personal finance books is very old. It started, like so many things in America, with Benjamin Franklin. In 1758, he published The Way to Wealth, a compilation of some of the money-related aphorisms contained inPoor Richard’s Almanac over the previous 25 years. The Way to Wealth is the source of many sayings that are still current today, including

Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

and

Keep the shop, and thy shop will keep thee.

Franklin’s financial advice is unusual, though, because he hardly ever refers to money. Instead, he talks about hard work, diligence, and frugality. With these qualities, he counsels, wealth is assured. “So what signifies wishing and hoping for better times,” Franklin writes. “We may make these times better if we bestir ourselves. Industry need not wish and he that lives upon hope will die fasting.”

Since Franklin’s day, financial self-help books have become a bit like diet books: They are in fashion for a season or two, then swiftly disappear into the discount bins. One book that has withstood the test of time, though, is George S. Clason’sThe Richest Man in Babylon. Clason was born in Louisiana, Missouri in 1874. He founded the Clason Map Company of Denver, CO, and hit it big with the first road atlases of the United States and Canada. In the 1920s, he began writing a series of pamphlets about personal finance, which took the form of parables set in ancient Babylon, the place where money may have been invented. Banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions started distributing Clason’s fables, and in 1926 he collected them into The Richest Man in Babylon. He died in 1957.

Clason is a worthy successor to Franklin. His stories are funny, familiar and studded with little aphoristic insights that make their lessons easy to remember. And like Franklin, he doesn’t talk as much about making money as about managing it.

Our acts can be no wiser than our thoughts.

Wealth that comes quickly goeth the same way.

Better a little caution than a great regret.

Where the determination is, the way can be found.

In 1965, Robert K. Merton published On the Shoulders of Giants, a profound, provocative peregrination along the trail of the aphorism

If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Merton demonstrates — through a series of astonishingly erudite, scholarly and witty digressions — that this saying, commonly attributed to Isaac Newton, was actually first coined by Bernard of Chartres, in the 12th century. OTSOG, as the book was dubbed by Merton, is one of the few texts in which the words “gnomology” and “gnomologist” both appear. The book is brilliant and, in the beginning at least, infuriating, written in the grand digressive and transgressive tradition of Tristram Shandy. Every page is littered with footnotes, some of them stretching across several pages, but the book is consistently amusing, too, mostly thanks to the fact that Merton never takes his incredible erudition—or the conventions of conventional scholarship—too seriously. His passion for this single aphorism—pursued across centuries, cultures, disciplines, languages—is amazing. The book is also replete with fascinating nuggets. We learn, for example, that it was the 17th century English divine John Glanvill who first coined the phrase “climate of opinion.” I learned what the word “stercoraceous” means: “of, containing, like, or having the nature of feces, or dung.” A pasquinade is “a satire or sarcastic squib posted in a public place.” Merton even finds literal depictions of great historical figures seated or standing (there are several hilarious considerations of just how one mounts the shoulder of a giant and whether one sits or stands when one achieves that great height) on the shoulders of even greater historical figures, such as the authors of the four gospels perched on the shoulders of four Old Testament prophets as depicted in the stained glass windows of Chartres. Merton even comes up with a great aphorism, though since he based the saying on a Shandean axiom we must conclude that he himself could only have plucked it from on high because he had a boost from Lawrence Sterne:

I regard an original error as better than a borrowed truth.

Together with the books of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, the book of Lieh Tzu makes up the trinity of Taoist classics.Lieh Tzu is the name of an ancient sage mentioned by Chuang Tzu but, like most Taoist texts, the book of that name was probably not written by the man to whom it is attributed. Lieh Tzu is supposed to have lived during the 3rd century BCE and was supposed to have traveled by riding the wind. The book that bears his name is a collection of stories, essays, tall tales and—in typical Taoist fashion—zany aphorisms.

What begetting begets dies, but the Begetter of the begotten never ends. What shaping shapes is real, but the Shaper of shapes has never existed. What sounding sounds is heard, but the Sounder of sounds has never issued forth. What coloring colors is visible, but the Colorer of colors never appears. What flavoring flavors is tasted, but the Flavorer of flavours is never disclosed.

Coming, we do not know those who went before; going, we shall not know those who come after.

A man to whom you need to speak only once is easily awakened.

All that is so without us knowing why is destiny.

Error is born from seeming.

The sage knows what will go in by seeing what came out, knows what is coming by observing what has passed.

The difficulty in ruling a state lies in recognizing cleverness, not in being clever oneself.

Pick the right time and flourish; miss the right time and perish.

Nowhere is there principle which is right in all circumstances, or an action that is wrong in all circumstances.

Worrying leads to glory; contentment leads to ruin.

Daniel J.Cauchie is a Belgian poet who, as he describes it himself, “got lost for 40 years in the world of international business and intrigues.” He’s now found his way back to poetry and philosophy, and writes aphorisms from his philosophical redoubt in the Swiss mountains. During World War II, he miraculously escaped from the Gestapo and took refuge in the Ardennes, where he hooked up with the American army and exchanged his knowledge of the local terrain for instruction in the latest American swear words. Some of Mr. Cauchie’s aphorisms:

A secret is something that one tells to one person at a time.

Truth is so often ugly that one should not tell it at all times and in all circumstances.

Generally, when people become heroes or criminals, they do so involuntarily or unconsciously.

Ferocity is dormant in every heart.

Neil McLachlan has presented television programs, worked as a theater usher, done a bit of stand-up comedy, and went slightly mad in a telesales job. He suffers from insomnia and says of his aphorisms: “a good deal of them (too many for comfort) [are] concerned with despair and disillusionment in one way or another.” Which puts me in mind of E.M. Cioran, another aphorist who suffered from insomnia, loved to hang out in cemeteries, and had a rather bleak take on life, the universe, and everything. Still, McLachlan is a lot more upbeat than Cioran, even if you have to dig a little bit to find the faint glimmers of light.

False hope is still a form of hope and will therefore always be preferable to true despair.

Seems profoundly unfair to insist on faith when faith is precisely what those most in need of salvation find impossible.

Youth is a promise betrayed by age.

A definition of work: doing something that doesn’t interest you in the company of people you don’t care for at the behest of someone you neither like nor respect.

Nowhere quite so calming as a cemetery, that lovely memorial to the pointless vulgarity of human life and the cosmic anomaly that is consciousness.

Nothing of value is achieved by an exertion of the will.

Tim Daly has been a performance poet and pop lyricist—working with musicians like Pink Floyd, Dave Stewart, Hugh Masekela, and Henry Mancini—and is now chairman of the West Cork Writer’s Group in Ireland. In the 1980s and 1990s, he produced a couple of albums for local Irish bands, wrote the theme song for a Roger Corman vampire flick called Dance of the Damned as well as other songs, but was determined, he says, “not to become one of those sad musos who dine out on past glories—choosing instead to become what I called ‘a well-adjusted has-been’”—which consisted of, among other things, running the Irish Arts & Crafts shop in Kinsale, training as a welder, and qualifying as a tour bus driver. And, of course, writing aphorisms, which, like the lyrics to a good pop song, tend to stick in your mind long after the melody has faded away …

To most of us the “Future” is full of wonder and promise, a vast sweeping sea of endless possibility, whilst to others it is more like snow they haven’t pissed on yet.

What is the difference between a story and a lie? The story adds something to your life whilst the lie takes something away.

Build all the good landmarks high.

The best way to regard your limitations is through a rear-view mirror.

Each arrow upon landing turns into another bow.

Habit is a very weak glue.

The Danger is that we spend the first half of our lives trying to live and then waste the second half trying not to die.

It is the cruelest irony that so many are imprisoned behind unlocked doors.

On March 14, 2008, the University of London’s Institute of Philosophy hosted a symposium on philosophy and the aphorism at Goodenough College. Poets, professors, philosophers, psychologists and comedians (all of them aphorists) from Europe and the United States gathered to discuss the aphorism as a bright, incisive way of grappling with the big questions of life—and to celebrate the form as just the thing if you hate ideologies but love ideas. Hereby a brief overview of the event, with links to foratv, which has posted video excerpts of some of the talks.

Tim Crane, director of the Institute of Philosophy, opened the day, which kicked off with a session entitled “What is an aphorism?” Stephen Clucas, reader in Early Modern Intellectual History, Birkbeck, University of London, examined attempts by some modern continental philosophers and theorists (including Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes) to privilege the de-stabilizing, unsettling and open-ended fragment over the oracular completeness of the aphorism. In a witty and entertaining talk, Sara Levine, associate professor, MFA in Writing Program, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, explored the pleasures and dangers of using the aphorism as a crash course in grammar and style for students aspiring to write “the great American novel.”

Simon May, college research fellow in Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London and author of The Little Book of Big Thoughts, traced how aphorisms have been a principal weapon in the West’s peculiar urge to destroy all so-called ‘totalizing’ ideologies and systems of thought while making surreptitious claims to ‘totality’ themselves.
Roger Scruton, author, philosopher, and research professor for the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, distinguished between true, common-sensical aphorisms and what he called “the way of the wizard,” aphorisms that are false, eccentric and used more as spells than statements.

The next session was entitled: “Aphorisms: international perspectives.”Friedemann Spicker and Jurgen Wilbert, co-founders of the German Aphorism Convention and the German Aphorism Archive, described their aphorism activism—through lectures, workshops and performances—in Germany.
Philippe Moret, author of Tradition et modernité de l’aphorisme, spoke about the beguiling aphorisms of Paul Valery, including this one: “The skin is the deepest thing in man.”
Sami Feiring, chairman of the Aphorism Association of Finland, traced the history of and present trends in Finnish aphorisms. Boris Mitic introduced us to the Belgrade Aphoristic Circle through clips from his documentary film on these satirical aphorists, Aphocalypse Now.

The next session was entitled: “Aphorisms: practitioners’ perspectives.” Don Paterson, Scottish poet and aphorist, started off by saying that “talking about aphorisms was like singing about painting,” but he nevertheless did manage to carry a lovely tune, outlining how “aphorisms generate aphorisms” through—appropriately enough—a series of aphorisms. James Richardson, American poet, aphorist, and professor of English and Creative Writing, Princeton University, talked about the aphoristic composition process and how it is different from writing poems. Fulvio Fiori, Italian author, playwright and aphorist, showed how he tries to “get aphorisms out of books” by performing some of his own sayings in the context of a talk about Zen and the art of the aphorism.

Bert Hellinger, German psychologist and aphorist, talked about—and demonstrated —how aphorisms can function as “words of healing.” The final session was called “Aphorisms: personal perspectives.” (Click here to see the full session on foratv.) I opened the session with a talk about how aphorisms are correctly described as pessimistic but how aphorists are, in fact, the ultimate optimists. (Click here for an excerpt from my talk on foratv.)

A.C. Grayling, author and professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, spoke about the aphorism as an elite form of literature, a point of view over which he and I disagreed during the Q&A portion of the session. John Lloyd, producer of classic British comedies like Not the Nine O’clock News, Spitting Image, Blackadder, and QI, gave a hilarious dissertation on the subject of aphorisms and jokes, part of which you can see here on foratv. Tim Crane closed a day during which we all learned—and laughed—a lot.

All photographs by Sami Feiring.