Aphorisms

"An aphorism, honestly stamped and molded, has not yet been “deciphered” once we have read it over; rather, its exegesis—for which an art of exegesis is needed—has only just begun."

"Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms wants not to be learned but to be learned by heart."

"Behind every aphoristic assertion there should be the watermark of a question."

"They’ve [aphorisms] got a real form to them. They’re not very popular or fashionable in Anglophone culture – they are assertions, so they can sound hubristic: you sometimes find yourself thinking, “Who the hell am I to say this?” But then, why not? You expect people to disagree. The point is to stir things up."

"The aphorism is only useful in small measured doses—but even then it’s only a kind of intellectual placebo, prompting ideas the reader should have prompted in themselves anyway."

"Despite our attempts to imbue them with some flavor, any flavor—aphorisms all turn out so...generic; they all sound as if they were delivered by the same disenfranchised, bad-tempered minor deity."

"This ME made whole by combining countless fragments could not live in any one part with complete ease."

"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it."

"An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog."

"Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy."

"An aphorism has been defined as a proverb coined in a private mint, and the definition is a happy one; for the aphorism, like the proverb, is the result of observation, and however private and superior the mint, the coins it strikes must, to find acceptance, be made of current metal."

"Experience is always seeking for special literary forms in which its various aspects can find their most adequate expression; and there are many of these aspects which are best rendered in a fragmentary fashion, because they are themselves fragments of experience, gleams and flashes of light, rather than the steady glow of a larger illumination."

"We frequently fall into error and folly, Dr. Johnson tells us, “not because the true principles of action are not known, but because, for a time, they are not remembered.” To compress, therefore, the great and obvious rules of life into brief sentences which are not easily forgotten is, as he said, to confer a real benefit upon us."

"It is in the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making."

"Aphorisms are rogue ideas."

"An aphorism is not an argument; it is too well-bred for that."

"Aphoristic thinking is impatient thinking"

"Most maxim-mongers have preferred the prettiness to the justness of a thought, and the turn to the truth; but I have refused myself to everything that my own experience did not justify and confirm."

"In an important sense, then, an aphorism is the “pure fool” of discourse, being only simply appearance. Yet the attempt to find it out will stir up the fermentation on which it rests, much in the way that Oedipus brings himself to light. The aphorism presents itself as an answer for which we know not the question."

"The aphorism is a mode of symbolic representation that belongs to an era dominated by highly individualized and introverted experience, atomistic thought and feelings, an absence of commonly accepted religious beliefs and moral standards and the general disintegration of traditional culture."

"The difference between an aphorism and a fragment is in their means of articulation. While aphorisms are primarily literary or philosophical, fragments can be pictorial, musical, or architectural as well. But because the highest degree of articulation can be achieved in an aphorism, it remains for all fragments the measure of possible expression and of their latent meaning."

"Un bon mot ne prouve rien."