Category: Aphorisms by Others
-
Advice for the Oversensitive
Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658), The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Doubleday, 1992, tr. C. Maurer, # 173): Don't be made of glass in your dealings with others. Even less so in friendship. Some people break very easily revealing how fragile they are. They fill up with resentment and fill others with annoyance. They are more sensitive than…
-
Don Colacho’s Aphorisms
Ah, the webbiness of the Web! I used an aphorism of Nicolás Gómez Dávila three days ago for purposes of logical analysis and received a comment from one 'Stephen' who is the proprietor of an interesting site devoted to translations of Don Colacho's aphorisms. The blog is appropriately entitled Don Colacho's Aphorisms. Please do check…
-
Fruitful Conversation
E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, p. 163: Conversation is fruitful only between minds given to consolidating their perplexities. A brilliant aphorism. Philosophy, as Plato remarks (Theaetetus 155) and Aristotle repeats (Metaphysics 982b10), has its origin in wonder or perplexity. Fruitful philosophical conversation, rare as it is and must be given the state of humanity, is…
-
Life Without Questioning
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book One, Section Two (tr. Kaufmann): . . . to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors [discordant concord of things: Horace, Epistles, I.12.19] and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning,…
-
Emile-Auguste Chartier
Emile Chartier (1868-1951) was a French professor of philosophy among whose students were Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Chartier's sunny disposition, however, did not rub off on the brooding Weil. Under the pseudonym 'Alain,' Chartier published thousands of two-page essays in newspapers. What follows is a striking sentence from the essay "Maladies of the Mind"…
-
Aphorisms Good and Bad
These, by Nicolas Gomez Davila, tr. Michael Gilleland, are good: With God there are only individuals. (I, 16) The individual shrinks in proportion as the state grows. (I, 21) The authenticity of the feeling depends on the clarity of the thought. (I, 24) To refuse to wonder is the mark of the beast. (I, 25)…
-
Happiness . . .
. . . is nothing more than good health and a poor memory. (Adapted from Albert Schweitzer)
-
On Owning Land
Blaise Pascal, Pensées #113 (Krailsheimer tr., p. 59): It is not in space that I must seek my human dignity, but in the ordering of my thought. It will do me no good to own land. Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I grasp it. Pascal is…
-
Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread
"The sky is the daily bread of the eyes," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson magnificently and truly. And this from a man who lived in New England where there is no sky to speak of. What would he have written had he been able to bathe his thoughts in the lambent light of the desert Southwest?
-
Neither Angel Nor Beast
Blaise Pascal, Pensées #329: Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast. The first half of the thought is unexceptionable: man is indeed neither angel nor beast, but, amphibious as he is between matter and spirit, a hybrid and a riddle to himself.…
-
The Value of Modesty
Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, tr. Paul Auster, p. 37: What good is modesty? — It makes us seem more beautiful when we are beautiful, and less ugly when we are ugly.
-
Where a Man Lives
Yet again from Joseph Joubert: Properly speaking, man inhabits only his head and his heart. All other places are vainly before his eyes, at his sides, and under his feet: he himself is not there at all. (Notebooks, p. 126)
-
Salvation Through Art? Comments on Some Aphorisms of Wallace Stevens
Herewith, comments on some aphorisms of Wallace Stevens from Adagia, aphorisms that sum up much of the aesthetic attitude I am concerned to oppose. (To be precise: I am out to oppose it in its imperialistic ambitions; I have nothing against art properly chastened and subordinated to the ultimate dominatrix, Philosophia.) I have bolded Wallace's…
-
Some Aphorisms of Otto Weininger
Otto Weininger, Ueber die Letzten Dinge (Wien und Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumueller Verlag, Neunte Auflage, 1930), pp. 65-72. Translations by BV. Grundzug alles Menschlichen: Suchen nach Realitaet. Wo die Realitaet gesucht and gefunden wird, das begruendet alle Unterschiede zwischen den Menschen. The quest for reality is a fundamental characteristic of human beings. Where reality is sought…
-
Style . . .
. . . is the physiognomy of the mind. (Arthur Schopenhauer)