Many people welcome new or different aphorisms in their lives, especially pithy statements which correspond to their world views and personal or past experiences. Aphorisms, then, have subjective appeal and mean or don’t mean much to a given listener or reader. But if there is truth within the concisely stated nugget of language and thought, then it has relevance, currency, and likely, lasting value.
Below some unexpected aphorisms from my reading of late–ones that gave me unexpected new insights into that which I already knew, but had never heard before encountered put quite so nicely, concisely.
Art serves to rinse out our eyes.
–Karl Kraus
I shop, therefore I am.
–Barbara Kruger
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
–H.L. Mencken
For myself, I am an optimist–it does not seem to be much use being anything else.
–Winston Churchill
Violence is suicide.
–Mohandas Gandhi
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
–Eleanor Roosevelt
History, like beauty, depends largely on the beholder.
–Desmond Tutu
Too much of a good thing can be simply wonderful.
–Mae West
It is better to live rich than to die rich.
–Samuel Johnson
The freer you feel yourself in the presence of another, the more free is he: who is free makes free.
–Johann Lavater
My business, my art is to live my life.
–Montaigne
To be everywhere is to be nowhere.
–Seneca
Boredom–the desire for desires.
–Leo Tolstoy
Better be alone than in bad company.
–Thomas Fuller
The eyes. Where the body ends and the spirit begins.
–Antoine de Rivarol
Distrust of authority should be the first civic duty.
–Norman Douglas
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
–Aldous Huxley
Only entropy comes easy.
–Anton Chekhov
The wrong way is endless.
–Bert Hellinger
A thought is an idea in transit.
–Pythagoras
Beware the barrenness of a busy life.
–Socrates
Exuberance is beauty.
–William Blake
Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
–Heinrich Heine
The genius creates harmony between the world in which he lives and the world that lives in him.
–Hugo Hofmannsthal
Shallowness spreads.
–Daniel Liebert
Few people die of love. But many of lovelessness.
–Jose Narosky
The ruts are deepest in the middle of the road.
–James Richardson
A politically correct culture is an imitation fur coat–inhabited by real fleas.
–Peter Robinson
Man would devour the stars if only he could.
–Rudolf Schroder
There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.
–Wallace Stevens
He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.
–Aristotle
A friend is your needs answered.
–Kahlil Gibran
No pressure, no diamonds.
–Thomas Carlyle
When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.
–William James
Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.
–Ortega Y Gasset
To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.
–Miguel de Unamuno
To live poetically is to densify life.
–Vilhelm Ekelund
A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is unlikely to look out.
–Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
–Ludwig Wittgenstein
Consciousness abhors a vacuum.
–Paul Valery