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. “These really were words to live by, and when I was about 13, I started collecting them.”
They continue to guide him through adult life, Geary says. When he was laid off from a job in journalism years ago amid media downsizing, he panicked. But within minutes of receiving the bad news, he thought of this line from Swedish poet and aphorist Vilhelm Ekelund: “to be placed on treacherous ground is good, because we only learn to stand on our own two feet when the ground is shaking underneath them.” Like any aphorism, it didn’t solve his problem – “but they kind of give you the headspace and the confidence and the affirmation to solve it for yourself. And so I use them every day.”
The bestselling book, whose second edition was published this month, contains a chunk of Geary’s collection, ranging from the ancient world to today, along with explanations of the history and significance of each phrase. And while the classics still serve their purpose, modern aphorisms help guide us through the endless digital, cultural and political upheaval that is life in 2025. Here are a few recent ones that might come in handy in 2025:
‘I shop therefore I am’
This phrase is the work of the New Jersey-born artist Barbara Kruger, born in 1945. Kruger, a former graphic designer for women’s magazines, often places bold words over black and white images, using “the language and format of advertising for aphoristic purposes”, Geary says. “Her aphorisms appear on billboards and they look like advertisements, but they’re advertisements for critical thinking.”
“I shop therefore I am” appeared on an image of a business card held in someone’s hand, in various iterations beginning in 1987.
The artwork, a play on the philosopher René Descartes’s “I think therefore I am,” might be decades old, but it feels even more relevant today. “In today’s attention economy and social media dynamics, how do I know I exist? Because I just bought something,” Geary says.
‘Adults think with their mouths open’
In the liner notes to Talking Heads’ 1984 album Stop Making Sense, David Byrne penned a list of aphorisms including “everything on stage should be larger than in real life” and “there is always something on television.” “Adults think with their mouths open” lends itself to a couple of interpretations, Geary notes: it conjures an image of a person puzzling something out in their head with their mouth agape, but it also suggests people tend to speak before they think – again particularly relevant in the era of social media.
Geary recalls David Letterman once asking the frontman if his lyrics meant anything; Byrne replied: “Not if you try to figure them out.” Aphorisms like this one, however, are the opposite – they demand to be thought through, and “when you do, you come to these secondary, tertiary meanings that make that single sentence so rich”, says Geary.
‘Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have’
The writer James Baldwin made this assertion in his book No Name in the Street, published in 1972 – so it may be a stretch to call it modern. But it feels as relevant as ever. “All around the world, expertise and knowledge is under assault, facts are under assault and journalism is under assault,” Geary says. “There’s a really unsettling and dangerous resurgence of people and leaders who don’t want to know inconvenient facts.”
This phrase is typical of Baldwin’s nonfiction. “There are these beautiful, ferocious sentences that just erupt out of the essay,” Geary says. “Whenever I’m reading anything, I look for those kind of moments.”
‘The trouble with setting goals is that you’re constantly working toward what you used to want’
It’s an upsetting idea – undeniably accurate, but it also undermines conventional wisdom about the importance of goal-setting. Still, in Geary’s reading, the writer Sarah Manguso’s remark functions more as cultural criticism than firm life advice. He argues this line from her 2017 book of her own aphorisms, 300 Arguments, is a critique of our obsession with achievement – “this kind of ceaseless striving for the next thing when you may not even want the next thing. You may be happy where you are.”
‘Life is the abyss into which we deliberately and joyfully thrust ourselves’
This advice comes from an animatronic figure at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, on display until next year. The 7ft-tall Fortuna is part of Kara Walker’s Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine), an installation featuring an array of automatons made from obsidian. Fortuna herself points to her mouth and offers visitors printed-out fortunes, including this one, which suggests an enthusiastic embrace of uncertainty, or a glimmer of hope amid darkness. To Geary, it speaks to the creative process. “Whether you write or paint or make music or sew, you always are starting from zero,” he says. “You’re always starting from staring into this abyss.” But, he says, “once you get into the flow of it, it’s the most joyous thing.”
‘Don’t mistake movement for progress, or quiet for failure’
OK, these wise words don’t actually appear in Geary’s book. Instead, they were created by an oracle known as ChatGPT, when I asked it to make up an aphorism. It seems like decent advice: whether you’re an activist or an artist, just because things are changing doesn’t mean they’re improving, and just because things look static doesn’t mean you’re on the wrong track.
Geary agrees that it’s solid , much better than the slightly unhinged aphorism ChatGPT spit out for him: “In life’s tapestry, metaphors weave truth’s cloak, disguising wisdom in the folds of everyday moments.” Whether the program’s advice is good or bad, Geary doesn’t see it as a threat to human wisdom, which will always be unique to the individual. His larger concern is that relying on AI to generate ideas and shape our language removes the challenge of writing, and by extension the essential challenge of thinking. A large language model can do the work for you – but “that defeats the whole purpose of having a brain, being an individual and living your own life,” he says. “Let ChatGPT write aphorisms too – great. I don’t mind. But let’s keep writing aphorisms ourselves.”
