Category: Aphorisms by Others
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Memo to Trump Haters
The way to get things done is not to mind who gets the credit for doing them.
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The Deep Thinker
Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies: Notes and Notations (Die Fliegenpein: Aufzeichnungen), Noonday 1994, tr. H. F. Broch de Rothermann, bilingual ed., p. 25: His thoughts have fins instead of wings. It flows better in German: Sein Denken hat Flossen statt Flügel. The title is my creation. Many of Canetti's notations express insights; others, however…
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Never Buy a Book You Haven’t Read
Wisdom and wit with a soupçon of paradox.
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What is Time?
Si nemo a me querat, scio, si quarenti explicare velim, nescio. Augustinus (354-430), Confessiones, lib. XI, cap. 14. Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere. Augustinus, Contra Academicos, 1. 2. 6 Time is a tangle of the most elusive and difficult topics in philosophy. For a mere mortal to grapple with any of…
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Alinsky, Tartakower, and Nimzowitsch: “The Threat is Stronger than the Execution”
Kai Frederik Lorentzen writes, In your latest blog entry you refer to Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Being aware that you are a chess player, I want to ask: Do you know that his rule number nine had earlier been formulated by grandmaster Tartakower? Alinsky: "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself." Tartakower:…
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Karl Kraus, Aphoristically, on the Art of the Aphorism
Beim Wort Genommen, (Muenchen: Koesel Verlag, 1955), p. 132: Einen Aphorismus zu schreiben, wenn man es kann, ist oft schwer. Viel leichter ist es, einen Aphorismus zu schreiben, wenn mann es nicht kann. It is often difficult to write an aphorism, even for those with the ability. It is much easier when one lacks the…
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Something Snowflakes and ‘Liberals’ Need to Understand
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted." Ralph Waldo Emerson, 8 November 1838
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Man as Onion?
Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind and Other Aphorisms (New York: Harper & Bros., 1955), p. 62, Aph. # 96: Man's being is neither profound nor sublime. To search for something deep underneath the surface in order to explain human phenomena is to discard the nutritious outer layer for a nonexistent core. Like a…
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Becoming Old and Being Old: A Paradox
Most if not all want to become old, but few if any want to be old. ………………… That's an old thought, not original with me, but I do not know who deserves the attribution. Its literary effect trades on equivocation. In one sense, an old thing is a thing that has been in existence a…
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Wonder Lost
I fanciulli trovano il tutto nel nulla, gli uomini il nulla nel tutto. The child finds everything in nothing; the man nothing in everything. And knocking back a couple or three Fanciulli cocktails won't help matters.
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The Relativity of Lived Time
Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living, Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009, p. 126, from the entry of 10 December 1939: Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours seem short and the years long. A very sharp observation. Unfortunately, most of Pavese's diary is not at this level of objective insight.…
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Wonder and Nonentity
George MacDonald: An Anthology, ed. C. S. Lewis, Macmillan 1960, #169: We must not wonder things away into nonentity. An occupational hazard of a certain sort of philosopher. My haiku commentary on MacDonald's epigram: Beginning in wonderWisdom runs the riskOf ending in das Nichts.
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Bondage
George MacDonald: An Anthology, ed. C. S. Lewis, Macmillan 1960, p. 41, #57: A man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than himself.
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True Whether or Not Aristotle (or Camus) Said It
Be skeptical of all unsourced quotations. Where did the Stagirite say this? Jumping ahead a couple of millennia, one finds the following bogus Camus quotation on several of those wretched unsourced quotation websites: "I would rather live my life as if there is a God, and die to find out there isn't, than live my…
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“No Man is a Hypocrite in His Pleasures”
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 95: Johnson: "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures." The Johnson in question is Samuel Johnson. Translator Bloom informs us that James Boswell's Vie de Samuel Johnson (Life of Samuel Johnson) was published in France in 1954. So it looks as…