Curated category
Aphorists
- Mark TwainMark Twain was born on the 30th of November 1835, shortly after Halley's Comet swept past the Earth, and he came to believe the two of them were bound…
- George OrwellGeorge Orwell did not exist on any birth certificate. The man behind the name was Eric Arthur Blair, born on the 25th of June 1903 in Motihari, in the Bengal…
- Oscar WildeOscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde arrived in the world on the 16th of October 1854 at 21 Westland Row in Dublin, and from the very beginning his life…
- Friedrich NietzscheOn the 3rd of January 1889, in the streets of Turin, Friedrich Nietzsche caused a public disturbance and two policemen approached him.
- Abraham LincolnAbraham Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky on the 12th of February 1809, and he died with a bullet in the back of his head at twenty-two…
- Theodore RooseveltTheodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest on the 14th of October 1912, while on his way to give a campaign speech in Milwaukee.
- AristotleAncient Greek scholars gave Aristotle a name reserved for one man: among medieval Muslim scholars he was "The First Teacher", and to Christians like Thomas…
- Jorge Luis BorgesJorge Luis Borges once described his blindness as a gift wrapped in cruel irony. In a poem he wrote that God, with splendid irony, granted him books and…
- René DescartesRené Descartes opened his treatise on emotions, the Passions of the Soul, with a startling promise. He would write on the topic, he said, "as if no one had…
- Victor HugoVictor Hugo died on the 22nd of May 1885, at 50 Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris. He was 83 years old, and he died of pneumonia.
- Franz KafkaFranz Kafka asked a friend to burn everything he had ever written. The friend was Max Brod, his literary executor, and the instruction was explicit: every…
- Mikhail BakuninMikhail Bakunin spent three years chained in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, alone in a cell, with no certainty he would ever leave alive.
- ConfuciusConfucius asked a single question when he came home from court and learned that the stables had burned down. He said, "Was anyone hurt?" He did not ask about…
- Georg SimmelGeorg Simmel was born on the 1st of March 1858 in Berlin, the youngest of seven children in an assimilated Jewish family.
- Ambrose BierceAmbrose Bierce closed his last known letter with a single sentence: "As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination." He wrote those words in…
- Blaise PascalBlaise Pascal was born on the 19th of June, 1623, in Clermont-Ferrand, in France's Auvergne region by the Massif Central, and he died 39 years later having…