#aphorism

Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism. ↗

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#aphorism #best #consists #exclusively #greatest

I got a note from my father, who said that Success is wonderful, if you don't inhale. That was his own aphorism, and I think it's the very best thing he could have said to me or anyone else on the subject. ↗

— Sam Waterston

#aphorism #best #could #else #father

Is a picture really worth a thousand words? What thousand words? A thousand words from a lunatic, or a thousand words from Nietzsche? Actually, Nietzsche was a lunatic, but you see my point. What about a thousand words from a rambler vs. 500 words from Mark Twain? He could say the same thing quicker and with more force than almost any other writer. One thousand words from Ginsberg are not even worth one from Wilde. It’s wild to declare the equivalency of any picture with any army of 1,000 words. Words from a writer like Wordsworth make you appreciate what words are worth. 
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#genius #humor #humorist #maxism #nietzsche

The American writer and dilettante Logan Pearsall Smith once said: 'Some people think that life is the thing; but I prefer reading.' When I first came across this, I thought it witty; now I find it—as I do many aphorisms—a slick untruth. Life and reading are not separate activities. The distinction is false (as it is when Yeats imagines a choice between 'perfection of the life, or of the work'). When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape—into different countries, mores, speech patterns—but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life's subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#books #life #reading #truth #imagination

How many of us have been attracted to reason; first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism. ↗

— Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

#attracted #been #conclusions #dazzling #draw

Embrace aging. ↗

— Mitch Albom

#aphorisms #age

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

#art #complete #entirely #hedgehog #isolated

Writing is beautiful, like putting on a gold suit and going to sleep in it. ↗

— Mark Leidner

#writing #beauty

Few things are more absurd than wise saws originally designed to inculcate or maintain the social needs of a society long past - when they are applied to today. ↗

— Idries Shah

#big-picture #lack-of-knowledge #lack-of-perspective #rigidity #design

Hindoo wisdom long ago regarded the world as the dream of Brahma. Must we hold with Fichte that it is the individual dream of each individual ego? Every fool would then be a cosmogonic poet producing the firework of the universe under the dome of the infinite. ↗

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

#humor #philosophy #dreams