Category: Aphorisms

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

Aphorisms at 6×12 +1

If you look back at your life and have no regrets, that should be your biggest regret.

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In the past, character made heroes; today, heroes are made of characters.

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Old adage: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Current adage: The only thing necessary for the triumph of good is for evil men to do nothing.

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True love makes unbearable life circumstances bearable.

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The bucket list of old age often reveals not future dreams, but past joys now out of reach.

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I’ve reached the semifinals of the senior musical chairs championship—a game where the chairs disappear, the music dies, and the last one standing still loses… just more slowly than the rest.

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My pickleball mantra (thanks to Toby Keith)

I ain’t as good as I once was, but I’m as good once as I ever was

Bangers: 624 aphorisms from 9 Deep Thinkers by Jash Dholani (Notes and Gems)

I read, collect and on occasion try to write pithy and wise aphorisms. Like a gold miner from the American West, I sifted through the contents of this book and found these gems. Author is listed before his aphorisms.

By La Rochefoucauld

We promise according to our hopes; we perform according to our fears.

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To establish ourselves in the world we do everything to appear as if we were established.

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Everyone blames his memory, no one blames his judgment.

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Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples.

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We become so accustomed to disguising ourselves to others that at last we are disguised to ourselves.

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The refusal of praise is only the wish to be praised twice.

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Those who apply themselves too closely to little things often become incapable of great things.

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By Nicolas De Chamfort

What makes the success of many books consists in the affinity there is between the mediocrity of the author’s ideas and those of the public.

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A WITTY woman told me one day what may well be the secret of her sex: it is that every woman in choosing a lover takes more account of the way in which other women regard the man than of her own.

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By Charles Caleb Colton

With books, as with companions, it is of more consequence to know which to avoid, than which to choose; for good books are as scarce as good companions.

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By John Lancester Spalding

To be more impartial about the modern world, you need the vantage point of old books.

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The weak, when they have authority, surround themselves with the weak.

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Conversation injures more than it benefits. Men talk to escape from themselves, from sheer dread of silence. Reflection makes them uncomfortable, and they find distraction in a noise of words. They seek not the company of those who might enlighten and improve them, but that of whoever can divert and amuse them.

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The smaller the company, the larger the conversation.

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By Austin O’Malley 

Beware of the patient man The bigger the dam of patience, the worse the flood when the dam breaks.

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A man’s life is like a well, not like a snake— it should be measured by its depth, not by its length.

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In selecting a wife use your ears before your eyes.

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By Goethe

An intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, a wise man hardly anything.

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Politicisms (not so polite)

Earth grows hotter by nature, and colder by nurture.

Reason whispers, but influence now belongs to whoever shouts longest and loudest. 

Democracy collapses not with a fight, but with a shrug and a spineless back.

If cowardice was our currency, there would be no national debt.

Washington belies the adage that old age brings wisdom.

You can’t fight today’s demons with the dulled swords of polite politics.

Image by AI

In Christ’s time, 30 pieces of silver, today a meme coin to buy a man’s soul.

Religion used to console the broken—now it emboldens and supports the breakers.

Our national IQ is falling faster than memberships for Kennedy Center events.

Discouraging or expelling foreign college and graduate students is akin to expelling firemen from a growing fire.

A nation in the pall of dementia—its people adrift, having forgotten their roots, their history, their purpose, and their friends.

More Notes and Asides

I can understand Trump’s desire to have the title of Pope. It would confirm at least in his own mind, his infallibility.

Recommend listening to Is the Sun Setting on America’s Financial Empire? | The Ezra Klein Show for an interesting discusssion between Ezra Klein and Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and a professor of economics at Harvard University on Trump’s tariff policy and its implications for the U.S. dollar and economy. Rogoff is rather blunt about how moronic the current economic path is.

Also suggest a listen to Where in the World Is Trump Taking Us? | TED Explains the World with Ian Bremmer. Bremmer is articulate, candid and very conservant about global affairs, the world economy, geopolitics and U.S. domestic policy. Like a professional referee, he calls them like he sees them.

I believe that our freedoms include the right to die with dignity. If an individual who is cogent and psychologically stable believes that she has lived life well, that her life is complete and that her future will not bring improvement or joy, she should have the right to make the decision to terminate her life. Period.
Joan Temko Anyon
San Francisco

Daniel Kahneman’s Decision: A Debate About Choice in Dying NYT

For those who have not seen it, I hardly recommend viewing Four Seasons, a romantic comedy movie from 1981 starring Alan Alda, Carol Burnett, Jack Weston and Rita Marino. I looked forward to the reprise of Four Seasons, 2025 Netflix version starring Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Will Forte and Kerri Kenney-Silver. However, I found the 2025 version to be dark, depressing and not very funny. The one bright spot in the movie was the acting of Steve Carell, whose character in the movie was most entertaining of the seven characters featured.

Maybe the most irritating commercials that I see on TV come from injury lawyers who probably boast of exorbitant cash settlements they get for their injured clients. Who winds up paying for these exorbitant cash settlements? The insurance companies? Not really. Consumers are on the hook for paying huge cash settlements as our annual auto insurance premiums continue to rise exponentially.

“Changing your mind once about a theory, an investment, or a person, is healthy. Changing your mind twice is not.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb