aphorism

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a concise, memorable statement expressing a general truth, principle, or insight, typically in a form that achieves compression of complex wisdom into a single arresting sentence; aphorisms are found in every literary and philosophical tradition from the Hippocratic aphorisms of ancient Greek medicine to the Confucian analects, the biblical Book of Proverbs, the European Renaissance tradition of maxims exemplified by Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld, and the modern tradition of literary aphorism in writers like Oscar Wilde, G.K. Chesterton, and Karl Kraus; the defining qualities of a successful aphorism are brevity, memorability, apparent paradox or unexpectedness, and the sense of capturing something true that the reader recognises but had not previously formulated; the aphorism as a form has experienced revival in the digital age where its compression suits the constraints of social media platforms and its quotability makes it highly shareable