The first aphorism I ever read was on the Quotable Quotes page of Reader’s Digest, one of only two publications available in my house growing up. (The other was Time magazine.) I must have been about 8 years old when I came across the following sentence by Gerald Burrill, then the Episcopal bishop of Chicago: The difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.
At the time, I had no idea what an aphorism was. I was just 8. And I had no idea what Gerald Burrill’s observation meant. But I knew there was something special about that sentence and the others I discovered on the Quotable Quotes page. I loved the puns, the paradoxes, the clever turns of phrase. And I was amazed at how such a compact statement could contain so much meaning.
As a kid, that aphorism stuck with me, even more so many years later when I finally understood what the bishop was getting at—that drudgery is a habit-forming enemy of joy, and that staying in a dead-end job leads nowhere. I’ve been obsessing about the respective depths of ruts and graves for more than 50 years now, wondering every morning whether I’m simply walking to work or slowly burying myself.
This article was adapted from James Geary’s book, The World in a Phrase.
This is the awesome power of aphorisms, and it is what sets them apart from the trite sound bites of social-media influencers and the platitudes of self-help gurus: Aphorisms do not make you feel good about yourself. That Burrill saying doesn’t offer an easy fix or a neat solution. In fact, it doesn’t offer a fix or a solution at all. It is a great example of aphoristic intelligence at work. It makes us reconsider what we’re doing, or not doing, with our lives.
Take the familiar saying “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Apart from the inaccuracy—in my experience, love means having to say you’re sorry on a regular basis—this is not an aphorism, because it’s too easy. It induces complacency. It doesn’t make you think. Much more confrontational, much more provocative, and therefore much more aphoristic is this, from the Polish writer Magdalena Samozwaniec: Love is that short period of time when someone else holds the same opinion of us as we do of ourselves.
Or this wry insight from the Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer: People mistake their limitations for high standards. Or the wisdom in this cynical definition by the legendary humorist Ambrose Bierce:
Misfortune
n. The kind of fortune that never misses.
Or the rueful truth of this observation by the 17th-century French aristocrat François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld:
How comes it that our memories are good enough to retain even the minutest details of what has befallen us, but not to recollect how many times we have recounted them to the same person?
In some ways, aphorisms are perfectly suited to our era of short-form communication. They’re concise, catchy, easily consumable. But so much of our discourse, online and IRL, is anti-aphoristic—rage bait, trash talk, knee-jerk toxicity, gauzy affirmations, hashtag claptrap. And now comes that upstart other AI, artificial intelligence, promising to reduce our cognitive loads to zero by proffering frictionless friendships and sycophantic agreeability, and doing all of our creative thinking for us.
Aphorisms are different. They are the antithesis of the half-baked hot take and nothing like the machine-made flattery that’s now permeating so many informational environments. A platitude is a placebo for the mind; an aphorism is a wake-up call. Aphorisms provoke debate; they don’t promote dogma. Though they’re short, aphorisms spur considered reflection, not Pavlovian partisanship. At a time when polarization is so amped up, aphorisms can serve as psychological circuit breakers, interrupting our comfortable assumptions and prodding us to open our minds, unclench our fists, and think for ourselves.
Have an important life decision to make? Heed the artist Jenny Holzer’s advice: Playing it safe can cause a lot of damage in the long run.
Holzer’s line is a cautionary tale about how taking no chances in your career, your relationships—your life—can ultimately be hazardous. Or consider this idea, from the French poet, painter, filmmaker, and boxing promoter Jean Cocteau: Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before sending back images.
Cocteau’s aphorism is a quippy but bracing reminder to look at ourselves differently in order to see others differently.
Dealing with aging, impairment, and death; confronting adversity and struggling with relationships; working through creative blocks and personal challenges—all of these things are supposed to be hard! The difficulty is the point. Where artificial intelligence makes things that are supposed to be hard seem like they’re easy, aphoristic intelligence accepts that things that are supposed to be hard are, in fact, really hard. Aphorisms gleefully increase our cognitive loads by immersing us even further in the difficulty and reminding us of what’s at stake.
Many researchers studying AI warn that tools such as ChatGPT, if overused, may promote dependence on technology and potentially trigger what they call metacognitive laziness—delegating challenging tasks to external tools instead of learning and doing them ourselves. Equally if not more concerning is the risk of metaphysical laziness—delegating challenging existential tasks to external tools instead of learning and doing them ourselves.
If a chatbot is calling my elderly parent for me, offering me nothing but relentless affirmation and validation, and writing all my texts, emails, and thank-you notes (not to mention my poems, screenplays, and novels), then I have become a spectator to my own mental and emotional life. My critical and creative thinking withers, and the very nature of thinking itself shifts from introspection to outsourcing, from seeing the big picture to painting by numbers. As the Austrian aphorist Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach once put it: Those who were carried to a goal should not think they’ve reached it.
This article was adapted from Geary’s book The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism.
The World In A Phrase – A Brief History Of The Aphorism, Second Edition
By James Geary
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