The Fountain at the Met
Aaron Haspel is a master of aphorism. And the Twitter is not going to change this fact. Is there a Madrasa where one can memorize his verses? But I really wish Aaron would resume blogging.
- “Real work ennobles the soul: fake jobs destroy it.
- Ask if you do your job well, but first ask if it ought to be done at all.
- Every party looks more attractive out of power.
- Few human decisions are as well-considered as suicide.
- Marital bliss and marital discord are equally inappropriate in public.
- When you have an idea that runs against your ideology, don’t suppress the idea, suppress the ideology.
- The businessman denounces government bureaucracy from the confines of a corporate bureaucracy that would shame an apparatchik.
- The ideal work environment for a writer is jail.
- Rather than spend time at work, spend the time you do spend at work working.
- Real experts know exactly how good they are.
- The most influential people in history have all spent entirely too much time by themselves.
- Old people look absurd playing rock. We know what this says about the old people, but what does it say about rock?
- A single arbitrary law can topple an entire code.
- Why people do things is a less subtle and profound question than why they don’t.
- Whatever you do for the sake of the children is probably wrong.
- J.D. Salinger has died, and the overgrown children who still read him will follow shortly.
- Men are more ashamed of correcting themselves than of erring in the first place.
- The laziest, loosest, and most popular organizing principle for prose is the list.
- Occasionally the operation succeeds but the patient dies; far more often it fails but the patient survives.
- Life may not be a game, but what works for one works for the other more often than you’d think.
- If Blake were understood he would no longer be read.
- If a rule is required, then its outcomes will be imperfect.
- If you’re not in a band at 20 you have no heart; if you’re still in one at 30 you have no head.
- The theory that genius and madness are ineluctably bound up has been responsible for most mad geniuses.
- People defective in reason fancy themselves compensated in imagination — which is imaginative.
- Professional courtesy merely props up the guild. It is professional rudeness that is in short supply.
- From fear can come adequacy, but never greatness.
- Attention begets all virtue, distraction all vice.
- God would satisfy no one without His viciousness and caprice.
- Most of what you think you have to do you don’t.
- Some men, like Balzac’s Goriot, are made of money. When it ends so do they.
- Because life has no meaning, a particular life can mean a great deal.
- Scientists have usurped the prestige that properly belongs to science.
- Movie-makers ought to restrict their budgets for the same reason poets used to write sonnets: constraint spurs creativity.
- Freud wields more influence in America than Marx ever did in Russia, though many of his most slavish disciples barely know his name.
- Living makes enormous demands on one’s time.
- God is not merely dead but stillborn.
- They laughed at Edison, they laughed at Fulton, and they laughed at every hopeless crackpot.”