Category: Aphorisms by Others
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Do You Seek Power and Position?
Then consider what Francis Bacon (1561-1626) has to say in his Essays (XI. Of Great Place): Men in great place are thrice servants — servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business; so as they have no freedom, neither in their persons, nor in their actions, nor in their times.…
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You Can’t Kill Her
Philosophy always buries its undertakers. (Etienne Gilson) Who reads Morris Lazerowitz now?
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The Diplomat
Not an original aphorism, but a good one nonetheless: A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you look forward to the trip. This illustrates the principle that in human affairs it is less what one says than how one says it that matters. Perverse as…
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Fewtril #202
From The Joy of Curmudgeonry: The sight of people competing to be victims seems to be odd and against the order of things until one considers that they are in fact competing to be victors. This is a fine example of the art of the aphorism. It is a happy blend of terseness and truth.
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A Man and a Woman Look into a Mirror
I just heard it on the Dennis Prager show. "A man looks in the mirror and sees Hercules no matter how he looks. A woman looks in the mirror and sees a wreck no matter how she looks." Those aren't Prager's exact words but that's the gist of it. The first sentence, at least, is…
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In Praise of the Useless
Morris R. Cohen, A Preface to Logic (Dover, 1977, originally published in 1944), p. 186, emphasis added: It would certainly be absurd to suppose that the appreciation of art should justify itself by practical applications. If the vision of beauty is its own excuse for being, why should not the vision of truth be so…
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What Blanshard Might Have Said to Derrida
A correspondent reminds me that today is Brand Blanshard's birthday. Born on 27 August 1892, he died on 19 November 1987. Here is a line from Blanshard's On Philosophical Style, Indiana University Press, 1967, pp. 52-53: Persistently obscure writers will usually be found to be defective human beings. The entire essay is available online here.
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My Favorite Pascal Quotation
Blaise Pascal, Pensees #98 (Krailsheimer tr., p. 55): How is it that a lame man does not annoy us while a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight, while a lame mind says that it is we who are limping. Please forgive the following reformulation. Point out to a…
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The Worst Thing About Poverty
Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), p. 38, written in 1940: 155. The worst of poverty — today at any rate — the most galling and the most difficult thing to bear, is that it makes it almost impossible to be alone. Neither at work, nor at rest, neither abroad nor…
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Nietzsche on Bentham, Mill, & Co.
"If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does." (Twilight of the Idols, "Maxims and Arrows," #12.) The art of the aphorism at its best. In all fairness to the English I should point out that it was…
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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,…
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Marriage a Long Conversation?
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human (tr. W. Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, p. 59): Marriage as a long conversation. When marrying, one should ask oneself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this woman into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but the most time during the…
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Wer schreibt, der bleibt
"He who writes, remains." Write on!
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An Excuse for Escribitionism
Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, p. 53: Anyone, providing that he can be amusing, has the right to talk of himself.
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Thomas Mann on Politics
From Thomas Mann's journal entry of August 5, 1934: A cynical egotism, a selfish limitation of concern to one's personal welfare and one's reasonable survival in the face of the headstrong and voluptuous madness of 'history' is amply justified. One is a fool to take politics seriously, to care about it, to sacrifice one's moral…