Aphorisms are not the warm and fuzzy phrases found in greeting cards. They are much more brusque, confrontational, and subversive. You don’t curl up with a good book of aphorisms; they leap off the page and unfurl inside you.
 
Aphorisms aren’t meant to make you feel good about yourself, either. More often than not, they are cynical and acerbic, an antidote to the bland, relentlessly upbeat nostrums in self-help guides and inspirational literature. They definitely do not cheer you up. Instead, aphorisms fulfill a much more difficult and important task: They make you question everything you think and do.
 
Aphorisms deliver the short sharp shock of an old forgotten truth. They keep your mind in shape by making you wonder every morn- ing whether you’re simply walking to work or digging your own grave. Aphorisms are spurs to action. It’s not enough to just read one and murmur sagely to yourself, “How true, how true.” Aphorisms make you want to do something; admiring them without putting them into practice is like learning to read music but neglecting to play an instrument.

This is how aphorisms can change your life.
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The philosopher J. S. Mill once observed that there are two kinds of wisdom in the world: “In the one, every age in which science flourishes surpasses, or ought to surpass, its predecessors; of the other, there is nearly an equal amount in all ages.” The first kind of wisdom is scientific. It consists in what we know about the world and how it works, and how we put that knowledge to use through technology. Since the Industrial Revolution at least, each age has surpassed the scientific achievements of its predecessors with astonishing speed.
 
Mill calls the second type the “wisdom of ages,” a somewhat exalted term for what we’ve collectively learned about human nature through the experience of individuals across thousands of years of history. This kind of knowledge is unsystematic, consists in psychological rather than empirical facts, and is present in more or less equal amounts in every historical period. So Dr. Phil McGraw potentially has just about as much— or as little— of this kind of wisdom at his disposal as the Taoist sage Lao-tzu, who lived in China about six hundred years before Christ. “The form in which this kind of wisdom most naturally embodies itself,” Mill concludes, “is that of aphorisms.”
 
Why aphorisms? Because they’re just the right size to hold the swift insights and fresh observations that are the raw data of the wisdom of the ages. Aphorisms are literature’s hand luggage. Light and compact, they fit easily into the overhead compartment of your brain and contain everything you need to get through a rough day at the office or a dark night of the soul. They are, as the nineteenth- century author John Morley observed, “The guiding oracles which man has found out for himself in that great business of ours, of learning how to be, to do, to do without, and to depart."