The beginning of self-knowledge: recognizing that your motives are the same as other people's. Votes: 16
The wisdom of age: don't stop walking. Votes: 13
After an argument, silence may mean acceptance or the continuation of resistance by other means. Votes: 10
While there's life, there's fear. Votes: 5
The time I kill is killing me. Votes: 0
Children use all their wiles to get their way with adults. Adults do the same with children. Votes: 0
The sage belongs to the same obsolete repertory as the virtuous maiden and the enlightened monarch. Votes: 0
The beloved is the ultimate fetish. Votes: 0
General statements omit what we really want to know. Example: some horses run faster than others. Votes: 0
Never ask a bore a question. Votes: 0
Complainers change their complaints, but they never reduce the amount of time spent in complaining. Votes: 0
Even cats grow lonely and anxious. Votes: 0
Astrology: do we make a hullabaloo among the stars, or do they make a hullabaloo down here? Votes: 0
A blocked path also offers guidance. Votes: 0
Complainers detest each other. Votes: 0
Even boredom has its crises. Votes: 0
Deconstruction: peering suspiciously at the text, I wait for it to make a slip and betray itself. Votes: 0
Street sign: Ho Hum Road & Easy Street In retirement, I look for days off from my days off. Votes: 0
Fluency avoids hard thoughts. Votes: 0
Swindlers are notoriously gullible. Votes: 0
Helplessness is a mighty power. Votes: 0
The squabbles of philandering Zeus and shrewish Hera are the Greeks' comment on married life. Votes: 0
Looking backward at what has been lost, I feel sad, then indifferent, and at last relieved. Votes: 0
I trust you because I need you. Votes: 0
Finding a thought for an aphorism is not hard. Putting a kink in its tail is the hard part. Votes: 0
Life is struggle and sleep. Votes: 0
Money: power at its most liquid. Votes: 0
The sewing machine joins what the scissors have cut asunder, plus whatever else comes in its path. Votes: 0
After rejection - misery, then thoughts of revenge, and finally, oh well, another try elsewhere. Votes: 0
Regret leads to overeating and naps. Votes: 0
Rebuttals never alter desire. Votes: 0
Rereading, we find a new book. Votes: 0
If you call failures experiments, you can put them in your resume and claim them as achievements. Votes: 0
Revenge is sweet but not nourishing. Votes: 0
Art seduces, but does not exploit. Votes: 0
Sacred texts always offend reason. Votes: 0
Self-analysis always cheats. Votes: 0
Self-criticism expands the opportunities for discourse and eliminates the need for an adversary. Votes: 0
Arrogance frowns; pride smiles. Votes: 0
Never try to leap from a standstill. Votes: 0
Even the most abject have a sense of superiority based on powerful though undefined merits. Votes: 0
Young men preen. Old men scheme. Votes: 0
Folly always knows the answer. Votes: 0
A budget takes the fun out of money. Votes: 0
A crisis unmasks everyone. Votes: 0
A frog in love would not be enchanted to learn that her beloved had turned into Prince Charming. Votes: 0
A suburb is an attempt to get out of reach of the city without having the city be out of reach. Votes: 0
After I have said what is required by my vanity and my morality, I may find a moment for Truth. Votes: 0
An illicit love affair seems sweetly old-fashioned in the age of one night stands and orgies. Votes: 0
Anybody can lead a frivolous life. A frivolous writer, however, must have taste and intelligence. Votes: 0
Art can make chaos seductive. Votes: 0
Art chooses its constraints. Votes: 0
As I criss-cross the city hurrying, I feel always the unchanging cold beneath the pavement. Votes: 0
Beggars market their incapacity. Votes: 0
Being enthusiastic settles nothing. Votes: 0
Between repetition and forgetting, it is a marvel that a new thought ever struggles into existence. Votes: 0
Boredom makes me sleepy or restless. Votes: 0
Cheap thrill: moral outrage revels in its own innocence and in the guilt of the wicked Others. Votes: 0
Children pay little attention to their parents' teachings, but reproduce their characters faithfully Votes: 0
City wits, country humorists. Votes: 0
Constant talkers are unheard. Votes: 0
Curiosity makes loneliness. Votes: 0
Curiosity, easily frightened, takes refuge in puzzles, murder mysteries, and spectator sports. Votes: 0
Cynicism has its own zealots. Votes: 0
Disillusionment is not truth. Votes: 0
Early every morning an old woman goes to the market to curse a grocery clerk, who curses back. Votes: 0
Electricity, water, gas, and steam course through the walls of my building, keeping it alive. Votes: 0
Elegance thrives on exclusion. Votes: 0
Emblem: the carapace of the great crowned snail is painted with all the flags of the United Nations. Votes: 0
Enough is ever-receding. Votes: 0
Envy grieves. Jealousy rages. Votes: 0
Errors are more numerous than truths, but fortunately too divided among themselves to take power. Votes: 0
Every book teaches a lesson, even if the lesson is only that one has chosen the wrong book. Votes: 0
Every time I change the way I explain myself to myself, I have to rearrange the story of my life. Votes: 0
Facts do not give advice. Votes: 0
Fear regulates. Appetite impels. Votes: 0
God improvises. Man systematizes. Votes: 0
Gossip is dying out because fewer and fewer people care to talk about anything besides themselves. Votes: 0
Happiness is often hard-hearted. Votes: 0
Heroes are born to be troublemakers. Votes: 0
Imprudence relies on luck, prudence on method. That gives prudence less edge than it expects. Votes: 0
Irony dissolves sentiment, but occasionally a sentiment is strong enough to dissolve irony. Votes: 0
It is not confused. We are. Votes: 0
Jokes are unanswerable objections. Votes: 0
Keep your lies short and simple. Votes: 0
Later is always my first choice. Votes: 0
Laughter scares off lust. Votes: 0
Leisure unmasks our weaknesses. Votes: 0
Life is the risk we cannot refuse. Votes: 0
Life is what it makes you. Votes: 0
Like love, grief fades in and out. Votes: 0
Loneliness is more likely to lead to fussy housekeeping than to grand views of the Universe. Votes: 0
Magic lives in curves, not angles. Votes: 0
Many gloat over their own troubles. Votes: 0
Maxims are sharp-edged half-truths. Votes: 0
Memory is imagination pinned down. Votes: 0
Methodology is applied ideology. Votes: 0
Moderation shifts when extremes do. Votes: 0
Money comes to life as it is spent. Votes: 0
My intentions go one way, my desires another. Thus I feel both self-indulgent and deprived. Votes: 0
My mind no longer has romantic abysses, but has become shallow, with many little gaps and cracks. Votes: 0
My nostalgia is for the impossible. Votes: 0
My taking a seat on the Council of the Fathers caused a desperate fluttering among my ghosts. Votes: 0
Necessity makes heroes of us all. Votes: 0
Never lie in writing. Votes: 0
No dignity without distance. Votes: 0
Old photograph: amid the set poses of her family, a young girl smiles and raises her hand a little. Votes: 0
Once I find the right maxim to apply, I feel that I have done all that can be expected of me. Votes: 0
Only death goes deeper than sex. Votes: 0
Only death rescues us from dying. Votes: 0
Our troubles keep us going. Votes: 0
Out of power, Marxism can develop critical intelligence; in power, it quickly becomes stupid. Votes: 0
Passion cooks. Reason cleans. Votes: 0
Pity drowns in numbers. Votes: 0
Posterity--the forlorn child of nineteenth century optimism--grows ever harder to conceive. Votes: 0
Radical historians now the tell the story of Thanksgiving from the point of view of the turkey. Votes: 0
Reading civilized the inner life. Votes: 0
Rescue someone unwilling to look after himself, and he will cling to you like a dangerous illness. Votes: 0
Self-esteem is not based on itself. Votes: 0
Self-pity makes people callous. Votes: 0
Sensuality takes planning and work. Votes: 0
Sign at the orgy: BODIES ONLY. Votes: 0
Silence kills scandal. Votes: 0
Simplicity is a strict taskmaster. Votes: 0
Since events are not metaphors, the literal-minded have a certain advantage in dealing with them. Votes: 0
Some crave grief like strong drink. Votes: 0
Sometimes "Yes" is rhetoric enough. Votes: 0
Tears are great peace-makers. Votes: 0
The beginning sets the rules. Votes: 0
The beginning, middle, and end are parodied, reversed, and hidden by modernism, but not abandoned. Votes: 0
The body has a mind of its own. Votes: 0
The closeups of pornography make human genitals look like undiscovered prehistoric animals. Votes: 0
The dignified catastrophes of tragedy bear little resemblance to the slow ruin inflicted by life. Votes: 0
The greater the privilege, the more hidden the arrogance. The Emperor of China need not exist. Votes: 0
The Lady: a fluty voice, sensible shoes, a melancholy sense of living by rules few still remember. Votes: 0
The language of pornography is abusive, that of romance adoring. Both are addressed to a fetish. Votes: 0
The madness of love can always be suspended--to cook dinner or catch a plane, for instance. Votes: 0
The magic of procedure: do this after that and thus before so; then your wish will be granted. Votes: 0
The nature of language may determine what most people say, but I always speak my own meaning. Votes: 0
The neuroses parody the virtues. Votes: 0
The past goes right on pulling me apart, though I can scarcely remember the people or the issues. Votes: 0
The plastic surgeon's knife slashes at time, which may seem to retreat, but then keeps on coming. Votes: 0
The poor live slow and hard; the rich, fast and easy. The rest of us shuffle along as we may. Votes: 0
The powerless worship Luck and Fate. Votes: 0
The prison is the state writ small. Votes: 0
The rich feel full of merit. Votes: 0
The world needs an enema. Votes: 0
Title deeds generally outlast poems. Votes: 0
To avoid eye contact, kiss. Votes: 0
To avoid taking responsibility, I become unresponsive but hang on until the other person leaves me. Votes: 0
To be thoroughly modern, an aphorism should trail off vaguely rather than coming to a point. Votes: 0
To learn a vocation, you also have to learn the frauds it practices and the promises it breaks. Votes: 0
Tolerance is a placid contempt. Votes: 0
True wit has a grave intention. Votes: 0
Trust, but look for the exits. Votes: 0
Truth is a necessary phantom. Votes: 0
Truth usually stammers at first. Votes: 0
Unconditional love is a lofty ideal, but unconditional hate is a fact well documented by history. Votes: 0
Was there a little time between the invention of language and the coming of true and false? Votes: 0
We understand through resemblance. Votes: 0
When love and adventure are finished, it's nice to have getting and spending to fall back on. Votes: 0
When love ends, we cry out against destiny. When friendship ends, we cry out against our friend. Votes: 0
Wisdom has lost repute because it so often applies to a state of affairs that no longer exists. Votes: 0
Wisdom remembers. Happiness forgets. Votes: 0
Wit puts politicians at risk. Votes: 0
Wit: a whim followed by a wham. Votes: 0
Withhold admiration from a narcissist and be disliked. Give it and be treated with indifference. Votes: 0
Yawns are hard to refute. Votes: 0
Listen to what people say about themselves; they will tell you everything you need to know. Votes: 0
Boast quietly, with decorum. Votes: 0