I've always been fascinated by aphorisms, maxims, proverbs, and those sorts of things. What is it that makes them so enduring, so satisfying, and so seemingly true? Why are we attracted to this form of expression moreso than longer and better-argued prose? Do things merely seem more true simply because they are wittily expressed, and if so, is that a good thing? (PG's recent essay had interesting things to say about this.)
Some interesting aphorisms from the master La Rochefoucauld:
- "In the misfortune of even our best friends, there is something that does not displease us."
- "Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples"
- "No persons are more frequently wrong than those who will not admit they are wrong."
- "We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears."
- "A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice."
- "We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones."
- "Almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we resort to to hide them."
My theory is that a good aphorism merely gives us "2+2", which prompts us to test it and conclude "4". This is much more persuasive than spoon-feeding us "2+2=4" in the first place, because we naturally trust our own conclusions more than the conclusions of others.
Your last paragraph fascinates me because I think it’s true.
There’s something about being told things directly that pushes people away, but a clever aphorism disarms us because it makes us feel smart for “getting it”.
There’s something inside us that prefers indirect communication.
Reminds me of an interesting exchange with a friend in sales and marketing recently.
It's an engineer-heavy company, and he's a marketing guy. He was brought in to give them some sales direction, some strategy. He comes up with some standard strategy, presents it. No, reasons. Meetings and presentations and essentially repeated NOs later, months and months of this, he eventually says to himself:
This is industry standard stuff. They're rejecting it because they don't understand. I'll do a big presentation, come up with loads of metaphors and catchy phrases and graphs, and present it.
He does this, result: oh, brilliant stuff, let's get this all implemented! Wonderful. It's the exact same stuff as before.
The story was told to me in terms of - "ah, isn't it great that everyone finally understood!", and my response was based on exactly your observation. They understood roughly as much as before, but if you don't get the metaphors, you look silly!
Language is fundamentally an abstraction of some more complex thought. To then repeat the exercise, to take complex language and distill it again to a simple abstraction in a few words, is probably deeply satisfying to our monkey brain.
Some interesting aphorisms from the master La Rochefoucauld:
- "In the misfortune of even our best friends, there is something that does not displease us."
- "Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples"
- "No persons are more frequently wrong than those who will not admit they are wrong."
- "We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears."
- "A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice."
- "We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones."
- "Almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we resort to to hide them."
My theory is that a good aphorism merely gives us "2+2", which prompts us to test it and conclude "4". This is much more persuasive than spoon-feeding us "2+2=4" in the first place, because we naturally trust our own conclusions more than the conclusions of others.