Aphorisms are a brief waste of time.
-Don Paterson, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
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“I know literature professors who have never read Moby Dick.” I don’t recall the source of that quote, but it resonated when I heard it. The first book I read after graduating with a degree in literature was Moby Dick. It had never been an assigned reading, and I believed anyone claiming erudition in literature should be able to reference such a venerable classic. It was 1978, and I was living alone in a tiny, furnished room in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. I had little more than my clothes and boxes of books. A yellow 1968 Oldsmobile Cutlass comfortably took me to a poorly-paid job as a book editor. Living the life! And yet, I still preferred the short forms — newspapers, magazines and anything that had those little pearls of “wisdom,” the pithy quote or maxim or proverb or aphorism. Whatever you chose to call it, that’s what I found most satisfying. Maybe it was the instant gratification? It also affected how I read books — noting the good parts, getting those little quotes into notebooks.
As life proceeded I kept reading books, usually 100 per year. Yet in my own writing, I gravitated more to the short form. My writing was almost exclusively magazine feature articles and opinion pieces. Privately, I was doing haiku poetry and playing with the aphorism. I have always intended to publish a book detailing my transition from the world of Washington political gamesmanship to organizing a community to provide a shelter for homeless HIV/AIDS folks in Atlantic City, living in the facility and ministering to the “condemned.” The book is plotted out and resides in a thousand computer files, yet I’ve never been able to organize it into book form. While I’ve learned a lot from reading books, I’ve also learned that I am not a book writer.
Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, suggests: “Where big books remind us of how hard the work of understanding can be, aphorisms remind us of how little we have to know to get the point.” His article on aphorisms is worth reading if you want to explore the academics of the style: The Art of Aphorism.
As I matured I found the true aphorists. I came to most like the harshest and darkest of them, the ones balancing on the razor’s edge. Mark Twain and Will Rogers are fine, but H.L. Mencken is a solid punch in the gut. And my favorite has become E. M. Cioran who can take a bite out of your very soul! How do you get better than this:
In the last stage of sadness, there are no longer any differences between tears and stones. The heart turns into rock, and the devils skate on your frozen blood.
-E.M. Cioran
So, this piece is an introduction to the aphorist, Brilliant Bill. By the way, that moniker was given to me by inmates when I worked in California prisons. While it had something to do with a perceived intelligence, it was more a gift of respect — they came to respect me because I was one of the few people who respected them as human beings. Hearing a shout of “Hey, Brilliant Bill,” from across a prison yard is still one of my treasured memories.
I’ve amassed lots of aphorisms over the years from all sorts of sources. I’ll include some of the best here. That will also provide a basis for judgment as to whether mine are any good. As the author of Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists wrote: “Read such of these as give you wisdom or pleasure, then pass them on.”
A good story opens with a snarling bark and closes with a wagging tail. Or is it the other way around?
-Brilliant Bill
Vengeance, empty calories for the spirit.
-BB
Writers are 10-a-penny. Reporters are gold.
-BB
The question that cannot be answered is the answer.
-BB
One of the earliest and greatest aphorisms comes from Hippocrates (circa 450-380 BCE), yes, that guiding light of the medical profession. I’ll offer two translations I’ve come across:
Life is short and art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult.
Life is short, Art long, Occasion sudden and dangerous, Experience deceitful, and Judgment difficult.
Experience makes for a much better experience.
-BB
No matter the facade a man fronts the world, there is always a woman, somewhere, who knows he’s just a little boy who wants his cookies and his mommy.
-BB
I have nothing to fear from one who has truly suffered.
-BB
He that has never suffered adversity is but half acquainted with others, or with himself.
-Charles Colton (1780-1832)
Even a solid gold toilet cannot ease the daily indignity of squatting to eliminate what your body doesn’t like about you.
-BB
It’s not the men in your life that matters, it’s the life in your men.
-Mae West
Beware the barrenness of a busy life.
-Socrates
One of the most famous aphorisms comes from the philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650), here in three different languages:
Cogito, ergo sum. Je pense, donc je suis. I think, therefore I am.
And a late Twentieth Century redux from biologist E.O. Wilson in his 1998 book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge:
I link, therefore I am.
Canned peas are technically food. They are also technically child abuse.
-BB
Howard Stern, once a radio “shock jock” and embodiment of social outrage is now the voice of reason. How did this happen?
-BB
A 50/50 relationship has a 50% chance of success. Try for 100/100.
-BB
Humans crave the illusions of power and control to assuage their fears. We are fundamentally frightened, little creatures bewildered by not knowing why we are here or what we are supposed to be doing. Truly, lost souls.
-BB
Love is bigger than happiness.
-Agatha Christie
Humans have a lot of trouble with the truth.
-R. Crumb
There’s no such thing as truth.
-Richard Avedon (photographer)
Beauty should cost something.
-Seph Rodney
Anything is possible.
-Anonymous
Everything is possible.
-Henry Ford
You cannot save people, you can only love them.
-Anais Nin
All we can do is love one another. And, really, that’s enough.
-BB
Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.
-Jean-Paul Sartre
A stricken tree, a living thing, so beautiful, so dignified, so admirable in its potential longevity, is, next to man, perhaps the most touching of wounded objects.
-Edna Ferber
There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
-Leonard Cohen
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart.
-Helen Keller
A 2018 article in The Guardian, “A rose with a thousand petals’ … what makes an aphorism – and is this a golden age?” said: “The aphorism is an excellently fugitive form. WH Auden, introducing his anthology, said: ‘An aphorism … must convince every reader that it is either universally true or true of every member of the class to which it refers, irrespective of the reader’s convictions.’” For me, the form is more probative than simply informative. For example:
The couple sat in the shade. vs The sunlight shines equally upon the good and the evil.
It takes more courage than most people have to truly sing along with the tune, “I Did It My Way.”
-BB
If you are lucky, you will come upon a certain age when you know it is too late. Leave something for others to fix.
-BB
Rationalize to your heart’s content, human beings will always choose to do what they really want to do.
-BB
Always there will be rain. Some will look up, some will look down. Will it be the same?
-BB
Spicing food with violently hot peppers is like throwing flowers into an incinerator, hoping they will make the world smell wonderful.
-BB
Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.
-Vincent Lombardi
When winning is everything, that means 99% of us are nothing.
-BB
Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.
-E.M. Cioran
To live is to lose ground.
-E.M. Cioran
Mental illness may not be an infectious disease, but its effects have killed just as many.
-BB
Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.
-Charles Colson (1780-1832)
A mother’s love is a birthright to her son, a beautiful woman’s love is a freely given gift that validates his life.
-BB
The rock music group, The Doors, sang,”Break on through to the other side….” That is aspirational rather than prophetic.
-BB
At age 20, my vitality was a chain saw ripping through the forest of life. At age 80, I am still, mute as that very forest recycles my being.
-BB
Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
The aphorism has a wry heart; the aphorist a tender one.
-BB
The first aphorists were society’s “wise men,” the seers, rabbis, magi, priests, etc. Essentially, they were just “yes men,” helping maintain order for the powers that be. Do this, don’t do that. Love one another. The wages of sin are death. Love one another, but don’t knock up your neighbor’s wife.
-BB
The aphorist is a strike-anywhere match looking for a rough surface.
-BB
The Google Assistant is “Happy to help.” So is the air in my car’s tires.
-BB
Bottom feeders, while less desirable, face fewer predators.
-BB
The aphorist among aphorists is just another guy.
-BB
Paper and ink do not a publisher make.
-BB
The owners and the beggars are parasites on the eternal poor. There are many recipes against wretchedness, but none against poverty.
-E.M.Cioran
The most debilitating fear is that fear we inflict upon ourselves. And for some, courage is a last resort or a sad regret.
-BB
My apartment looks like a homeless person lives there.
-Anon
If you run from technology, it will chase you.
-Robert Pirsig
Try to be free: You will die of hunger. Society tolerates you only if you are successively servile and despotic; it is a prison without guards — but from which you do not escape without dying.
-E.M Cioran
No matter how full the tank, empty is always on the horizon.
-BB
Cuff links — first tell of a pretentious ass.
-BB
True human freedom is only the first six months; after that, expectations come upon you, and they never stop.
-BB
We all must do our duty, even if only the regular bowel movement.
-BB
Time is unique to the individual. It seems like a straight line, but sometimes it takes you around a corner.
-BB
Tales of the carnival barker. As sure as a Peruvian caribou.
-BB
Sooner or later people believe writers rather than the government.
—Gabriel García Márquez
…that espresso crap. It tastes like the road.
-Anon (heard in a cafe)
Having been unable to strengthen justice, we have justified strength.
-Blaise Pascal
Beauty cannot exist without melancholy. And melancholy without beauty is emotional paralysis.
-BB
See the gallery I curate at Flickr, A Melancholy Beauty.
Old age is in the gaze of a very young child with an expression from another realm asking, “Why are you still here?”
-BB
Make no mistake about why these babies are here – they are here to replace us.
-Jerry Seinfeld
Aphorisms are jokes shorn of everything but the punchline.
-James Geary
This world was created from God’s fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.
–E.M. Cioran
Sad, a twist of fate perhaps, but someone does have to be from Encino.
-BB
Life is not about conflict, measured in victories and losses. That’s called war, and war is death.
-BB
“Manhood” is a bullshit construct under any definition. You either behave like a good person or you don’t.
-BB
We’re semi-civilized beasts with baseball caps and automatic weapons.
-George Carlin
Within my own lifetime I have completed the journey from my perfect day as a wanderer to an old man crouching by a wall in the October sun, glad to be left alone to his observations of insects and such small mammals as remain.
-Loren Eiseley
Literature is news that stays news.
-Ezra Pound
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
-Eleanor Roosevelt
Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.
-Anton Chekhov
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-George Bernard Shaw
The aphorism is the oldest and the shortest literary art form on the planet.
-James Geary
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
-H.L. Mencken
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
-H.L. Mencken
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
-H.L. Mencken
Summer ends, and I’m grateful for winter. When I want heat, I’ll make it myself, thank you.
-BB
Horses are good people.
-BB
The great art of films does not consist in descriptive movement of face and body, but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.
-Louise Brooks
Reality has its own dignity and integrity.
-BB
We are each as different and individual as snowflakes. Yet we are all part of the same blizzard.
-BB
Journalism is not advocacy, it is revelation.
-BB
When you go to prison you go alone.
-BB
Firearms are the physical apparition of an evil resident in human nature. They have absolutely no purpose but to kill and maim. They serve no constructive purpose whatsoever. Humans survived and thrived thousands of generations without them. If you love guns, you embrace evil.
-BB
To expect a government that has destroyed a nation to save that nation is a ludicrous fantasy. We are a crumbling empire too far gone to do much more than witness our own demise.
-BB
Violence is our very raison d’être. Boredom is our mortal enemy!!
-BB
Any time of the day is a good time for pie.
-Fabienne, Pulp Fiction
Total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.
-Saint Augustine
Weather is to be tolerated, not enjoyed.
-BB
Forecasting tomorrow’s weather is a coin toss. Beyond that, we don’t have enough money to say.
-BB
Opinions are like elbows. Everyone has a couple, they can be pushy, and no one really wants to see them.
-BB
Santa Claus is a made man for the retail marketing crime family.
-BB
A lifetime supply at age 75 is not the same as at age 25.
-BB
History is just one damn thing after another.
-Sarah Churchwell
Anticipation is joy borrowed from the future.
-BB
For the poor, the economic is the spiritual.
-Mohandas Gandhi
Humanity is the apex creature on the planet, or so we believe. We have survived, even thrived, for perhaps 200 millennia, yet we have done so in spite of ourselves rather than because of ourselves. And in this Twentieth Century of the Common Era, we have perhaps fashioned a box canyon from which we have no escape.
-BB
Death is a wave wiping the slate clean as it silently slips back into the sea.
-BB
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You think too much.
-Jane Tracy (Mother of Brilliant Bill)
I’m not convinced the aphorism is truly a literary form. Granted, it is a notch above the Hallmark greeting card drivel. It has value, but sometimes I think its literary value is more like a nurturing manure. Without rich manure, our earth may be a desert, and without the aphorism, our literature might be diminished. In its defense, I’ll close with these three quickies:
A quip a day keeps the boredom at bay.
The aphorism requires no bookmark.
The aphorism, bet you can’t read just one!
Dead Reckoning 
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