More Aphorisms by Aleksandar Cotric

Serbian aphorist Aleksander Cotric (see p. 30 of Geary’s Guide) is back with some Forbidden Thoughts, his new collection of aphorisms. Fellow Serbian aphorist Aleksandar Baljak says Cotric “securely occupies the pinnacle of Serbian satirical literature.” That’s surely correct; these sharp sayings are not for the faint-hearted… Cotric’s aphorisms can also be found in Serbia’s [...]

Aphorisms by Mica M. Tumaric

Mica M. Tumaric comes from the anarchic, acerbic, antic aphoristic alembic that is the Balkans. Born in Novi Sad in 1949, he is a journalist by profession and, like most of his fellow Serbian aphorists, a satirist by vocation. His work has been translated into English, Russian, Hungarian, Romanian, Ruthenian, Slovak, Macedonian and Bulgarian, among [...]

Aphorisms by Patricie Holečková

Patricie Holečková is a Czech aphorist. Born in Slovakia, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kracow and has lived in the Czech Republic since 1982. Her aphorisms first appeared in the Czech anthology A Good Word Never Cuts to The Quick (2004). Her first collection, Aphorisms (Oftis), was published in 2005 and [...]

Aphorisms by Anna Fitch Ferguson

Jim Finnegan, proprietor of the ursprache blog, has done it again. He’s found yet another obscure yet fascinating aphorist, as he explains here:
“At a church book sale, I found a lovely little book—Bits of Philosophy: From The Letters and Journal of Anna Firth Ferguson (Concord, Mass.,1933)—written by a woman who lived much like Thoreau [...]

New Aphorisms by Daniel Liebert

Daniel Liebert (see pp. 292–293 of Geary’s Guide) is back with some new aphorisms. But not just any aphorisms; these are his own take on Ramon Gomez de la Serna’s greguerias. “As far as I’ve been able to ascertain,” Dan writes, “I am the world’s only writer of greguerias.” Dan defines greguerias as combining “aphoristic [...]

New Aphorisms by Ramon Gomez de la Serna

Along with Malcolm de Chazal, Ramon Gomez de la Serna is one of the weirdest and most wonderful (and most woefully neglected) aphorists in the entire history of the form. Gomez de la Serna (see pages 370-371 of Geary’s Guide) died in the early 1960s, having written dozens of books and hundreds of so-called “greguerias“—his [...]

Aphorisms by Sabahudin Hadžialić

Sabahudin Hadžialić is another Balkan aphorist and also deputy editor-in-chief of the online satirical weekly Zikison. Like many Balkan aphorists, Hadžialić works as a journalist. In 2009, Hadžialić published a book of aphorisms, satirical dramas, and short stories called Abecedna Azbuka. Balkan aphorisms tend to be blunt rather than surgically sharp, so that when the [...]

Aphorisms by Zoran Matic Mazos

Zoran Matic Mazos hails from Serbia, which has to be the geographic location with the highest per capita proportion of active aphorists in the world, perhaps because the political situation there has been so ripe for aphorisms for so long. Mazos, a graphic designer by profession and a cartoonist by vocation, writes a form of [...]

Aphorisms by ‘Solomon Slade’

‘Solomon Slade’ is the pseudonym of an aphorist who has penned three hundred sayings (Solomon’s 300, Maxims for the 21st Century) as a gift for family and friends this Christmas. Giving aphorisms as gifts is a dangerous business, since the wise words themselves are not always so festive. But Slade’s sayings come from a [...]

Aphorisms by Bo Fowler

Bo Fowler loves aphorisms; he fiddled with the form in college, penning his own sayings on transparent strips of paper and leaving them inside crusty books in the university library; and aphorisms helped him woo his wife-to-be. Fowler is also the author of the novel, Scepticism Inc. He says he “intends to write one hundred [...]


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