Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Aphorisms by Others

  • Misattributed to Socrates

    I am a foe of misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression.  Have I ever done any of these things?  Probably.  'Suffering' as I do from cacoethes scribendi, it is a good bet that I have committed one or more of the above.  But…

  • Play It Again, Sam

    Sinatra says somewhere that the the pro is the one who can play it the same way twice.

  • Roger Scruton on the Art of the Aphorism

    Speaking Neatly. Excerpt: FALSE APHORISMS are not as rare as one might think. More significant than Wilde's, on account of its influence, is Marx's dismissal of religion as "the opium of the people." For this implies that religion is adopted purely for its ability to soothe the wounds of society, and that there is some…

  • He Understood the Principle

    Henry Thoreau was once asked whether he had read a newspaper account of a local suicide.  He replied that he didn't need to; he understood the principle.  This anecdote comports comfortably with an observation Henry David makes somewhere in his journal: Read not The Times; read the eternities.

  • Some Aphorisms of Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

    I have discovered the aphorisms of Stanislaw Jerzy Lec via a reference in a book by Josef Pieper.  Here are a few that  impressed me from More Unkempt Thoughts (Curtis Publishing, 1968, tr. Jacek Galazka), the only book of Lec's I could easily lay hands on. No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible. (9)…

  • To Doctor Empiric

    When men a dangerous disease did 'scape    Of old they gave a cock to AesculapeLet me give two, that doubly am got free    From my disease's danger, and from thee. Ben Jonson (1753?-1637) from Epigrams and Epitaphs (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 27. At the very end of the Phaedo, having drunk the hemlock, Socrates is…

  • Susan Sontag on the Art of the Aphorism

    At any given time I am  reading twenty or so books.  One of them at the moment is Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2012.  In the midst of a lot of stuff, there are some gems.  Here is one: Aphorism is aristocratic thinking: this is…

  • A Reason Why Germany Had to Lose the War

    Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night, tr. A. Dru, Pantheon, 1950, p. 172, entry #579 of 10 September 1941: A year ago today the official propagandist, Fritsche, talking on the wireless, said of the bombing of London: 'Once upon a time fire rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrha, and there only remained seventy-seven just men;…

  • Socrates, Plato, and an Ass

    Schopenhauer somewhere jokes that the medievals employed only three examples: Socrates, Plato, and an ass [Esel, nicht Arsch]. 

  • Some Aphorisms and Observations of Thomas Sowell

    Here

  • Adapted from Teilhard de Chardin

    We are not human beings on a spiritual journey; we are spiritual beings on a human journey.

  • Adapted from Pascal

    There is light enough for those who wish to see, and darkness enough for those who don't.

  • Death as Equalizer, I

    At game's end, pawns, pieces, and King all go into the same box. (Adapted from an Italian proverb.)

  • The Secret of Travelling

    Freya Stark, Beyond Euphrates, p. 246: The secret of travelling is to leave one's past behind, and to keep a mind a little blank and empty for  the new to be received.

  • Politicians

    Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. 9, Human Experience, p. 126, #520, emphasis added: Politicians — more interested in their own careers than in sincere public service, ambitious to gain their personal ends, unwilling to rebuke foolish voters with harsh truth until it is too late to save them, forced to lead double lives of misleading public statements…