The Old and New Testaments of the Bible are filled with aphorisms aimed at instructing and enlightening followers of the faith. The anonymous teacher of Ecclesiastes is known for terse sayings such as, “That which is crooked cannot be made straight.” In ancient China, the philosopher Confucius was also a master of the form. In the “Lun Yu,” he warns, “If a man take no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand.” As in the Bible, aphorisms of the Far East were intended to educate disciples of a specific philosophy.
During the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th Century, aphorisms became instruments of profound wit. The English writer Samuel Johnson famously railed that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” and that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” In the European colonies, aphorisms helped describe the developing ethos of the New World, including a distrust of concentrated wealth. In “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” Benjamin Franklin wryly said of man, “He does not possess Wealth, it possesses him.”
The prophetic English poet William Blake, who helped usher in Romanticism in the late 18th century, was a genius of aphoristic composition in both poetry and prose. In his poem “The Divine Image,” Blake connects divinity to the human condition in a succinct statement: “Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell, / There God is dwelling too.” In his philosophical treatise “There Is No Natural Religion,” Blake uses aphorisms to build a new theology: “The desire of Man being Infinite, the possession is Infinite and himself Infinite.” Later poets of the Romantic movement often wrote aphoristically when describing poetry itself. In his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," the poet William Wordsworth said, "Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge."
Aphorisms abound in modern literature. In the 1940 novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Ernest Hemingway wrote, “There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true.” In the same novel about the Spanish Civil War, he penned another memorable phrase: “The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for.” The line was used at the end of the 1995 film “Seven,” in which Morgan Freeman’s character recalls the aphorism and then adds that he agrees with the second part of it. In modern literature, titles themselves have become aphoristic. The title of Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” has become a common saying in American society, independent of its original context.