See also Karl Kraus, incendiary pamphleteer of fin-de-siecle Vienna, perhaps especially his collection of aphorisms called Half Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths…
Mine are decent and I have a whole 14 followers. Guess it’s time to compose one about being under appreciated.
Here’s one I overheard:
Time is the best filter.
The original context was a product demo of Splunk.
What do we do with aphorisms that are clever and demonstrably false?
Pay them more mind than we should.
[quote=“boingboing, post:1, topic:51589”]What we call maturity is mostly fatigue.[/quote]Ooh. Surely someone must have stumbled upon something like that before?
Looking at his feed (and following): while you have managed to cherry-pick some chestnuts, there is also an awful lot of chaff.
(triple-mixed metaphor ftw)
Yeah. I think most “successful” aphorists have had their golden needles picked from many mountains of straw.
Unrelated – perhaps my fave from Oscar Wilde, and one of the few that I’ve liked and can actually remember:
Work is the refuge of people with nothing better to do.
He has nothing to declare but his lack of genius?
It’s sad that families today have to be torn apart by something as simple as wild dogs.
Wait. Sorry. That was my favorite Jack Handy-ism.
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
My favorite Groucho Marxism.
I won’t argue the elegancy of concision, but it only works for ideas that are already known. Here is a quote from Noam Chomsky :
“The beauty of [concision] is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts. If you repeat conventional thoughts, you require zero evidence, like saying Osama Bin Laden is a bad guy, no evidence is required. However, if you say something that is true, although not a conventional truth, like the United States attacked South Vietnam, people are going to rightfully want evidence, and a whole lot of it, as they should. The format of the shows do not allow this type of evidence which is one of the reasons concision is critical.”
I can’t tell if it was said about data in Splunk or Splunk itself. 
Would wearing a shirt that says “Art is not a crime. Wearing a shirt that says “art is not a crime” is a crime.” be a crime?
IDK but its an enhanced interrogation technique just thinking about it 
The former, not that I was paying a whole lot of attention. But I wrote that one down.
Another great book of aphorisms is Glimpse by George Murray: http://www.amazon.com/Glimpse-Selected-Aphorisms-George-Murray-ebook/dp/B004C04SHU
I agree about George Murray. He’s probably better than I am. Karl Kraus, mentioned above, is also great, although none of the English translations are really adequate.
Darius Kazemi’s attempt at making an aphorism-detector ended up making Marxist/Silicon-Valley jokes:
http://tinysubversions.com/notes/aphorism-detection/
https://twitter.com/hotteststartups
I would argue that a couple of his other bots nearly qualify, here:
https://twitter.com/received_wisdom
