#aphorism

To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening. ↗

— Saki

#edwardian #humor #humor

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

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

I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#education

The eleventh commandment of art: thou shalt not be boring. ↗

— W.M. Driscoll

#art

There is truth in wine and children ↗

— Plato

#children

The flame that burns Twice as bright burns half as long. ↗

— Lao Tzu

#philosophy #proverb #philosophy