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This section includes most of my aphorisms.

Religion, ideology and honesty
Nature and the universe
The arts
Life and death
Happiness and suffering
Humanity and its achievements
Power and justice
Miscellaneous

A short introduction to the Aphorism form

Aphorisms: religion, ideology and honesty

The great achievements of religious architecture, painting, sculpture and literature are no evidence for religion but evidence that people may have far less talent for critical thinking than for art.

The primitive, understandable fear of becoming lost, of leaving behind roads and paths, helps to explain the refusal to follow an argument wherever it leads, the reassurance of religions and ideologies.

For Christians, the Christian revelation has taken away from life the mystery which for the non-Christian remains. For skeptics, far more than for Christians, this is a mysterious and magical world.

This world is inexhaustible and unfathomable. We need speculate about no other. (From a poem.)

Religious people who are 'deep' may be simply out of their depth.

The horrific imperfections of the world foster courage and ingenuity. Why not skepticism?

Self-evident untruths and half-truths will always be popular.

Honest people may well reinterpret their lives at intervals as drastically as totalitarian regimes reinterpret their own history

'I detest your ideology and the ideologies you detest.'

'The later can be better than the earlier.' There's more consolation in this than in all the religions of the world. It may even console us for the existence of those religions.

The hatred of fanatics for those who embrace only one side of a contradiction and not both, the hatred of fanatics for the almost certain as much as for the completely unconvinced.

If the world were imperfect in the way that Christians or communists suppose, Christianity or communism might be true, but it's imperfect in a way that refutes them. And so for other theisms and other ideologies.

Humanity can be explained only partly in natural terms but not at all in supernatural terms.

Aphorisms: nature and the universe

Never play music loud in the countryside, even if the music is intensely beautiful and the countryside very dull.

A pool need not remind us of the sea.

A mountain so awesome that it forces us to look down rather than up.

More and more, being amongst natural beauty is like attending a concert interrupted by coughing and talking from beginning to end.

I emerge from a winter without much snow as unrefreshed as from a night without much sleep. (From a poem.)

It is one of the signs of the triumph over nature that there are so many facetious people.

It's impossible to swim in water in which it's impossible to drown.

Technology is as indifferent, ambiguous and wasteful as nature.

It is not so much that nature is so cruel as that part of nature is so sensitive.

Nature is an assemblage of dissimilar components, which often cohere beautifully.

Perspectives: from the parochial to the regional to the national to the international, which is parochial if it takes no account of nature.

The relationship between the mind and the universe is far from being that of an infinitesimal against the infinite.

Let us not meet indifference with indifference, above all in the case of nature.

Contrasts so extreme it takes a universe to contain them.

Aphorisms: the arts

Writers have not much incentive to be strong, since they can make so much of their weakness.

Poeticules use a rule.
Poets use a graticule.

To the born writer, the blank sheet of paper (or computer screen) is as inviting as Walt Whitman's open road. But often, the road turns out to be blocked.

A writer must usually be far more patient than a gardener.

As well as explaining reality and reflecting reality, art extends it, so that reality becomes more mysterious and problematic than ever.

Depth and insight, like talents and abilities, may go to the less deserving.

Many books come complete with their own antidote, many are innocuous, some are addictive, a few are fatal.

Pain, waste, the humdrum, ignorance, violence and chance - the world throws up all sorts of objections to shallow and inadequate thought and art.

The world is so constructed as to discredit superficial thought and art.

There isn't much difference between the most austere music and the most sensuous poetry.

If you're tiring of very great music, listen to some very bad music.

Art may demand a willingness to avoid short cuts and to acquire insights at ruinous cost.

Few aesthetic matters are also moral matters.

Aphorisms: life and death

Simple curiosity has probably never been the motive for a suicide.

Dying must be terrible - like becoming blind, deaf, dumb and totally paralyzed, and losing your mind, all at once.

The richness of a life rich in disappointments. (From a poem.)

We feel that the death of an old person is much less tragic than that of a young one, even though it may be the older person and not the younger one who has achieved so little, experienced so little.

The central facts of life are revealed by experiences which are marginal and of rare intensity.

The years accumulate, and are compressed.

As well as the obvious limits at its beginning and end, each life has limits at the sides.

The desperate people who feel that whilst there's death, there's hope.

Hope is sometimes a form of greed.

Some people decide to submit to disease, accident and death earlier than others.

Aphorisms: happiness and suffering

Pain that seems to be in the body is often a sign that there's something wrong with the body. Pain in the mind is often a sign that there's something right with the mind.

The body knows the difference between happiness and unhappiness but not the difference between spirituality and deadness.

Conventional, and courageous, people like others to suffer sensibly and not to give way to despair or rage - in other words, not to suffer as intensely as they might, or perhaps to extract as much benefit from the experience as they might. A kind of courage is needed for self-pity.

We're often told that we can't find happiness by trying to find it but we're often given advice as to how to dispel unhappiness.

Did you become an optimist (or a pessimist) by looking into yourself or at the world?

It's not at all unreasonable to feel sorry for someone who is happier than you are.

Many people will put up with any amount of suffering, their own and other people's.

'Since the blind exist, the main point of life can't consist in what is seen, since the deaf exist the main point of life can't consist in what is heard...fulfilment must be open to all.'

The sufferings of the world are too terrible for our imaginations to encompass, so we naturally concentrate our attention on something more manageable, our own sufferings.

Aphorisms: humanity and its achievements

A very ordinary, unspectacular, unpretentious person with grotesque omissions, abyssal ignorance, monstrous self-deception and superhuman courage.

The things that unite us as humans are not much different from the things that unite us as living creatures.

People are often cowardly where little courage is needed and heroic when the highest courage is called for.

Aphorisms: power and justice

See that justice is done even when no law has been broken.

Even the most benevolent power for good ought not to be unchecked by other powers.

Aphorisms: miscellaneous

The person who doesn't neglect any duties and obligations is as constrained as an invalid.

The relationship to the few and simple elements of someone's existence may be one of gluttony.

In some professions, burning ambition is best served by the appearance of an innocent naivety towards modish and ridiculous ideas.

If a cause is a good one, it may have to triumph over the methods used to promote it and the arguments used in its defence.

I'm a vegetarian but I'm far from placing all vegetarians above all meat-eaters, or even above all cannibals.

From the Introduction to the Oxford Book of Aphorisms, by John Gross

This is a superb collection.

"...although the two words ['maxim' and 'aphorism'] certainly overlap, they are far from interchangeable...Aphorisms tend to be distinctly more subversive; indeed, it is often a maxim that they set out to subvert. And they are less cut and dried, more speculative and glancing...[the aphorism] is a form of literature, and often a highly idiosyncratic or self-conscious form at that. It bears the stamp and style of the mind which created it; its message is universal but scarcely impersonal...There are times when the very form of the aphorism seems to lend itself to a disenchanted view of human nature. Anxious to distance himself from platitude, the aphorist is drawn towards the unsettling paradox...there are of course as many different kinds of aphorism as aphorist...classic aphorisms and romantic aphorisms, aphorisms which deflate and aphorisms (rather fewer) which console."