Everything – Page 68 – A book of aphorisms
Jun 082021
 

The minor benefit of exercise is that it improves your health; the major one is that it improves your looks.

Jun 072021
 

“How can you say that such-and-such is against X, when X is right there in its name?” This argument owes its extraordinary popularity to its utility as a trial balloon: people who swallow it will swallow anything.

Jun 042021
 

One must not treat actors, athletes, rock stars, or television journalists as if they were sentient adults. They are performing monkeys, like children better seen than heard, and not entirely responsible for their own actions.

Jun 032021
 

Never let Possibly Better be the enemy of Perfectly Adequate.

Jun 022021
 

Intellect is scorned in all times and places, and usually protects itself by traveling incognito. Physical beauty is apparent to all, and where it is attacked, invariably in the guise of a celebration of ugliness, we find an especially deformed and vicious age.

Jun 012021
 

Atrocity, A Natural History

1. It didn’t happen.
2. It was much smaller than you think.
3. It was entirely justified.
4. What we need is more such atrocities.

May 312021
 

The contemporary doctrine that art should shock, and the greater the shock the better the art, is the last twilit ruin of Longinian aesthetics — sublimity for a jaded age.

May 282021
 

When bemoaning all that you should know, but do not, spare a thought for all that you should not know, but do.