#aphorism

Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies. ↗

— Emil Cioran

#melancholy #misery #syllogism #misery

That which yields is not always weak. ↗

— Jacqueline Carey

#flexibility #weakness

It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses. When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun. In the mind's arithmetic, 1 plus -1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true. ↗

— James Richardson

#proverbs #truth #wisdom #equality

The laughter of the aphorism is sometimes triumphant, but seldom carefree. ↗

— Mason Cooley

#carefree #laughter #seldom #sometimes #triumphant

I will never do this, says one, yet does it: I am resolved to do this, says another; but flags upon second Thoughts: Or does it, tho’ awkwardly, for his Word’s sake: As if it were worse to break his Word, than to do amiss in keeping it. ↗

— William Penn

#life

The slope contains many wonders not found at the summit. ↗

— Marty Rubin

#inspirational #philosophy #inspirational

All Excess is ill: But Drunkenness is of the worst Sort. It spoils Health, dismounts the Mind, and unmans Men: It reveals Secrets, is Quarrelsome, Lascivious, Impudent, Dangerous and Mad. In fine, he that is drunk is not a Man: Because he is so long void of Reason, that distinguishes a Man from a Beast. ↗

— William Penn

#men

Whether you live to be 50 or 100 makes no difference, if you made no difference in the world. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#funny-quotes #humor-quotes #inspirational #iving #making-a-difference

There is music you never hear unless you play it yourself. ↗

— Marty Rubin

#inspirational #music #inspirational

The American writer and dilettante Logan Pearsall Smith once said: 'Some people think that life is the thing; but I prefer reading.' When I first came across this, I thought it witty; now I find it—as I do many aphorisms—a slick untruth. Life and reading are not separate activities. The distinction is false (as it is when Yeats imagines a choice between 'perfection of the life, or of the work'). When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape—into different countries, mores, speech patterns—but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life's subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#books #life #reading #truth #imagination