Chamfort's line can be found in Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, recently published by Bloomsbury USA. James Geary, writer and editor, has been at the aphoristic fount before, in The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism (Bloomsbury, 2005). Rich in surprises, that marvelous book opened the possibilities for the more comprehensive Guide. Many of the aphorists in the new book will be known to everyone: Plato and Cicero, Michel de Montaigne, Dr. Johnson, Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, Wilde, and so forth. But the real pleasures lie in the volume's unexpected treasures: Chamfort, Ludwig Marcuse, Karol Bunsch, Faina Ranevskaya, Ali Ibn Abi Talib, Benjamin Whichcote, and count...

Chamfort's line can be found in Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, recently published by Bloomsbury USA. James Geary, writer and editor, has been at the aphoristic fount before, in The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism (Bloomsbury, 2005). Rich in surprises, that marvelous book opened the possibilities for the more comprehensive Guide. Many of the aphorists in the new book will be known to everyone: Plato and Cicero, Michel de Montaigne, Dr. Johnson, Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, Wilde, and so forth. But the real pleasures lie in the volume's unexpected treasures: Chamfort, Ludwig Marcuse, Karol Bunsch, Faina Ranevskaya, Ali Ibn Abi Talib, Benjamin Whichcote, and countless others.

Quoting Franklin Roosevelt, Geary begins by saying that his motto in compiling the anthology was: "Be sincere, be brief, be seated." As a result, he does not linger on any one aphorist and offers a brief but entertaining biography of each, with a selection of essential aphorisms followed by a fascinating section called "Parallel Lines." Aphorists like all creative writers to some extent, are gifted plagiarists; that is, they feed on language, taking and transforming what went before them, giving fresh life to what was taken. Ideas belong to no one, only specific language does. And so aphorists take a whiff of what's in the air and put a name to what they smell. Thus we read in Ecclesiastes: "A fool's voice is known by a multitude of words." Centuries later, Ezra Pound says: "The less we know, the longer our explanations."