Aphorisms by Vesna Dencic
Vesna Dencic is from Serbia, where she trained as a journalist and now writes poetry, literary essays, short stories and, of course, aphorisms. The Balkans is richly aphoristic, and these days Balkan aphorists have plenty of material to work with, given the region’s tumultuous recent political history. Dencic chronicles the Balkan aphoristic tradition on a [...]
Aphorisms by Lori Ellison
As a college student, Lori Ellison dreamed of opening her own fortune cookie factory “with fortunes something like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies and aphoristic writings but couched in the assured language of divination.” Fortunately, she’s kept that dream alive by writing her own oblique yet assured aphorisms. A painter, writer, and lifetime independent bookstore clerk [...]
Aphorisms by Harry L.S. Knopf
Harry L.S. Knopf has been a practicing physician for over 30 years. As a comprehensive (general) ophthalmologist, he has treated babies, children, young adults, mature adults and the elderly. He is also part of a long and venerable tradition of medical aphorists that began with the main man himself, Hippocrates. The famous Greek physician composed [...]
Aphorisms by Nick Didkovsky and Charles O’Meara
An aphorism a day is my prescription for a happy, healthy mind. It is a prescription being filled with enormous verve and humor by guerrilla aphorists Nick Didkovsky and Charles O’Meara, at their quaintly titled but delightfully subversive site Aphorism of the Day. Didkovsky (a guitarist, composer, and software programmer) and O’Meara (a guitarist, [...]
On There Being An Aphorism for Everything
There is a what for everything?, I hear you ask. An aphorism, I say: a short, witty, philosophical saying. An aphorism for everything, and everything its aphorism; that’s my philosophy. Here are a couple of examples:
When I am shaving in the morning and I behold my rapidly receding hairline—a modest curl rushing towards the [...]
On Memory
On Sept. 11, I blogged about visiting the chateau of La Rochefoucauld in France, recalling how my first glimpse of a chateau-like building in Europe (the stadhuis in Delft) reminded me of Disneyland. My wife read that blog posting and pointed out that it was not me who compared the stadhuis to Disneyland; it was [...]