When it comes to aphorisms, the biggest hits are familiar: “a penny saved is a penny earned”, “a picture is worth 1,000 words”, the one about why teaching fishing is better than fish donations. These phrases have been around so long they can feel as old as language itself.
But aphorisms aren’t just historical artifacts. People regularly come up with new ones, and even if they haven’t come from the pen of Confucius or Emily Dickinson, they can shed light on the modern human experience with just a few words. In fact, “the aphorism is, in some ways, perfectly suited to the digital age: the oldest form of literature finds its ideal vehicle in the most modern short modes of communication,” writes James Geary in The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism.
Geary calls himself an “aphorism addict”. The author has been fascinated by these nuggets of wisdom since he was an eight-year-old reading the Quotable Quotes section of Reader’s Digest. “I loved the puns, paradoxes and clever turns of phrase. And I was amazed at how such a compact statement could contain so much significance,” Geary writes.
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