Category: Aphorisms

Not the “Greatest Generation”

History will not be kind to the people of the United States. We scroll endlessly through our iPhones, binge stale entertainment, and anesthetize ourselves with online gambling, crypto speculation, and relentless consumerism while our culture erodes and our economic and political institutions decay. Future generations will curse us—not for what happened to our country, but for how little we cared.

Aphorisms below that caught my eye and mind and address the insanity of today…

I feel much better, now that I’ve given up hope.

Ashleigh Brilliant

Filling our pockets, we empty our hearts.

Dražen Jergović

Opinions, and not religion, are the opium of the people.

Being open-minded requires a lot of effort. Being narrow-minded is effortless.

Piotr Bardzik

The poor always fight the wars of the rich.

Never hire the best lawyer; the worst judge will be cheaper.

Andrzej Majewski

The truly strong are those who aren’t driven by the need to prove their strength.

Richard Greene

Judge us by how we treat the weak not by how we arm the strong.

Charles R. Castle

To close the deficit we need to raise taxes on 5 out of every 4 Americans.

Oleg Vishnepolsky

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

H.L Mencken

Summer Requiem

The calendar measures years. The heart measures summers.

No memory is as vivid as the one that can never be relived.

Blistering summer heat cools even the strongest urge to go outside.

The ocean washes more than the shore.

Young love kindled at summer solstice often fades at first frost.

February crawls. August flies.

Aphorisms with a Sly Eye

In an age when many natural resources are becoming scarce, humanity will never run short of excuses.

Imagination slows as technology grows.

In the age of AI, seeing is no longer believing.

A younger woman often serves as an energy charge to the dying battery of an older man.

Giving advice to someone in their 70s is like offering money to a billionaire, kind gesture but rarely necessary.

Leeches heal in medicine… steal in politics.

Investing without risk may be the greatest investment risk of all.

Sage 5.0 Pickleball Wisdom from a 3.0 Aphorist

The pops of pickleballs at the park sound like a cacophony to some, but to players they’re a symphony.

Pickleball requires planning, hand speed, aggressiveness and anticipation and that’s just to login and register for a meetup.

An 11–0 loss may teach you more than an 11–0 win.

Irony: The player who arrives in a $60,000 car carrying a $250 pickleball bag, a $250 paddle, wearing $200 pickleball shoes and $150 sunglasses… but forgets (?) the $3 ball everyone can use.

Service rules in recreational pickleball are like jaywalking laws—written down, widely not enforced.

A DUPR rating is like an IQ score: useful, but not always an accurate predictor of future performance.

Sometimes the best strategy to improve your pickleball game is to take a day off from playing and rest.

Occasionally the action off the court is often more interesting than the action on the court.

To clear their heads in order to think.
 Many pray. Many meditate
. Some dink.

The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Review and Samples)

If you enjoy wise and pithy aphorisms, I highly recommend this book. Taleb can also be found on YouTube videos in various presentations and lectures about risk, fragility, randomness, probability and other subjects.. He is a very smart man on a variety of topics. It’s a mental and intellectual adventure to keep up and understand what he is saying at times.

Here is a very small taste of his wisdom and thinking from the book…

Maternity’s double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.

If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead – – the more precision, the more dead you are.

It is not possible to have fun when you try.

Decline starts with the replacement of dreams with memories and ends with the replacement of memories with other memories.

The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age, without wisdom, and life without grandeur.

Avoid calling heroes those who had no other choice.

The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile and power without suffering from it.

The Bed of Procrustes

Those who can’t do shouldn’t teach.

For Seneca, stoic Sage should withdraw from public efforts when unheeded and the state is corrupt beyond repair. It is wiser to wait for self-destruction.

Early Spring Muses and Aphorisms

The quiet tragedy: longing for the life you never had more than living the one you do.

Distrust all advice, including this!

A dog will learn a new trick; an old man will defend the old one.

The older you get, the less planning you need- your calendar shrinks to a Post-It on the refrigerator.

Financial advisors are like weather forecasters: they predict storms and suffer no penalty when you get soaked.

Today’s political and corporate leaders and influencers share a common skill: telling a good story—truth optional.




Fickle Finger of Hate

I find it totally fascinating how sports fans demand perfection in games that don’t matter and patience in affairs that do. A coach can fall quickly out a favor with fickle fans and lose their jobs instantly when their teams underperform often unrealistic expectations, while the chief executive of this country, despite a calamity of losses and fumbles with far greater consequences to the public than games over a much longer period of time, keeps his.

EAB 10/12/25