(Brief) Words of Wisdom


(Credit: James Geary)

Here’s something to think about this morning found over at Designmind.

Amidst all the Twittermania, it’s good to remember that the short form has a long history: Aphorisms revealed “truisms” long before 140-character tweets became the predominant art form of the short-attention-span-economy. “An aphorism is a novel packed into a single line,” said Oleg Vishnepolsky, using an aphorism himself, or as Wikipedia puts it, an aphorism is a “concise statement containing a subjective truth or observation cleverly and pithily written.” Unlike tweets, aphorisms are philosophical rather than mundane, but like tweets their beauty lies in their economy: they’re accurate while leaving the all-too-literal unsaid.