Aphorisms
1. All the blooms, all the nectar are for the pollen.
2. “Follow your bliss”. And we listened and like ships lost in the night we eschewed the stars and navigated by clouds.
3. A key to life is being able to distinguish your talents from your pleasures.
4. As with crystals, you can tell the structure of a person by how they break.
5. Why do people believe that aesthetic brilliance equals wisdom? It’s like taking investment advice from someone because they’re a good cook.
6. Every day can’t be ice cream Sunday.
7. If you want to live with common things then you must take what common brings.
8. Never buy a plan on the attractiveness of the first step.
9. On Receiving Praise in the Arts: If he told me I was on fire, I would check – twice.
10. Performance seeks to gain love and escape intimacy. So does promiscuity.
11. The lesson of cheese: with care and effort and study a thing of supreme beauty can be made of spoilt milk.
12. The Epitaph of Western Civilization: They read novels and thought they were educated.
13. The most romantic poem is composed of quotidian words.
14. The most transparent people are opaque to themselves.
15. The primary concern of nature is how to make a seed survive. From this truth comes all behavior and fruit.
16. The reality of these events is so horrible. These representations make us believe, falsely, that we know what horror is.
17. The unexamined life is not worth talking about.
18. The value of harmony is the potential for discord
19. There is nothing worse than autobiography masquerading as insight.
20. Things are what they are. They are not trying to be something else and failing.
21. Free Love: You get what you pay for.
22. To the Philosophers: Complexity that does not yield clarity is scarcely superior to ignorance.
23. Wheat is less valuable as a food because it keeps.
24. When you give someone the perfect gift, you call him by his secret name.
25. When you see the color of an object, remember, that is the one color the object is rejecting.
26. With her the nut ain’t worth the shell.
27. You are the ringmaster of your heart. You like to think you have control, but really it is just a whip and a whistle – and if you are lucky a good working relationship with the lions.
28. You can’t refuse to join the Nazi party on moral grounds and then complain that you don’t get to wear such nice uniforms.
29. Where are the poets of uxorial adoration?
30. As with food so with love – the first bite is bliss, the rest mostly eating.
31. Dante was correct that the lowest level of hell was for traitors – and as such it is chock-a-block full of men who make a craft of exploiting the sanguine treasure maps that manifest when maidens blush.
32. If there is no risk there is no game.
33. In order to have magnetism you must have polarity.
34. On the Children’s Commandment: in Hebrew “honor” does not mean “imitate”
35. The accidents of his upbringing have become universal laws of nature.
36. The lesson of string: The most delicate fibers if spun tightly could move the Earth, but for the lack of a fulcrum and place to stand.
37. The lesson of wine and women: with time something unbearably cloying can bring delightful inebriation.
38. American Fear: “the fault dear Brutus lies not in the stars but in ourselves that we are not always happy.”
39. Counter-factual thinking is the Adversary’s playground.
40. If plants made buying decisions, television would be nothing but programs about sunlight and water and rich, black, dirt.
41. In matters of the heart the mind is always the last to know.
42. We gain skills from practice. Being from New York I am really good at crossing the street and ignoring things.
43. Her greatest mistake: A feeling got me into this and a feeling is taking me out.
44. I have the perfect combination of self-love and self-loathing to really effect personal change.
45. If done properly, the accidental is taken as inevitable and purpose rushes into a life.
46. It’s not about getting an answer; it’s about getting closer to the energy that is asking the question.
47. Seeing everything for “what it is” is psychologically healthy, but not quite human.
48. She thinks adulthood is the key to the candy drawer.
49. She’s cute. She corrects her own grammar when she speaks.
50. The more you do as you list, the less you can be who you list.
51. Unable to find satisfaction, he spent his days looking for pleasure.
52. We make wishes to remember what we want. We pray to remember what is important. For the lost and the virtuous these are the same.
53. We pay attention to things that concern our safety.
54. You fear what would happen to you if you were not afraid.
55. You want to experience love from a safe distance. In love there is no safe distance.
56. Don’t deny what just happened. Just say “no” to it. You can say “no” can’t you?
57. When someone gives you their ear it is a precious gift and should be respected.
58. On Living in New York City: I am done picking my friends on merit. I need to start filtering for geography.
59. Some artists you can see clearly when inspiration leaves them. Sincerity does that.
60. The great lesson of Yoga: Life is a balancing posture.
61. The trick to success is leveraging people’s misconceptions about who you are.
62. I am not saying you will be happy. I am saying you will get what you want.
63. Questionable aesthetic preference is the sign of an inferior soul, not always.
64. On Games of Chance: if you want the cards to pleasure you, you are lost.
65. It is the poor hedonist that seeks satisfaction. There are some parts of yourself that you want to torment.
66. I can already feel what she will be like as a memory.
67. Fatal Attraction has probably prevented more extra-marital affairs than VD.
68. It is not so much that I dislike her – as it is that I dislike the person that I become when I am near her.
69. The First Axiom of Sophomoric Psychology: The Truth is the most painful explanation.
70. To Liberals and Socialists everywhere: All success does not come from unfair advantage.
71. It will never make sense. Maybe it will make something else.
72. On Gardening (and possibly covetousness): Whoever says the grass is greener doesn’t have to mow it.
73. On Virtue: The Thracians are the best people. They haven’t lost their taste for burnt meat.
74. On Even the Coyest Mistress: If she wants to, she will help you.
75. Until you have walked next to one of those guys on a hot summer day you will never realize how much showering really does.
76. I have lost the privilege of preference.
77. You can’t realistically fight for good in hopes of defeating evil. You do it in the hope of keeping it in check.
78. Creativity is seeing the invisible and knowing what goes next.
79. An Introspective Standard of Proof: Don’t say, “I am”. Trust “I have noticed about myself”
80. On moral turpitude: Where there is a will, there is a way out.
81. What part do you play in the love story you are in?
82. The Masochistic Hedonist: If I do not work hard I am not being sufficiently punished.
83. Push through the pain. That is where the good stuff is.
84. It’s a terrible idea, but not a bad solution.
85. He wasn’t even nice enough to lie.
86. Before the fight: “Just because you are better than me, yah think that yer better than me?”
87. Muscular action is not the same as the spontaneous response of the nervous system.
88. Absolute internal consistency is a sophomoric demand, and probably impossible.
89. If you can’t love your wife what fucking good are you?
90. What we search for is what to work on
91. To call him dull as dishwater is to grossly underestimate how interesting dishwater can occasionally become.
92. If your story is 2 plus 2, and you tell the audience 4. They will hate you
93. The end of the affair: We’ll always have Paris; now get on the plane.
94. Kiss.
95. Listen.
96. Energy rises though the rhythmical interplay of effort and surrender.
97. You spend the afternoon unkissed. It’s absurd really.
98. If you want to get out of your head you have to get into your body.
99. She’s a little scared of me. It’s kinda sexy.
100. He can no longer distinguish force of habit and the impulse of the body.
101. Nothing insults a man more than a woman using caring as a form of rejection.
102. Love. Just because we bring it into our homes doesn’t make it civilized.
103. When are they gonna realize that a belly shirt is a privilege, not a right.
104. What is the money of the economy you are in?
105. If you don’t worship you will never be The Pope. If you only worship you will never be The Prophet.
106. The journalist versus the poet: One art uses fantasy to construct reality, the other uses reality to construct a fantasy.
107. Art is the science of the soul.
108. On compatibility: Why should they be together? Complimentary fantasy lives.
109. The essence of any performing art is tempo.
110. If we are to believe the movies: In the future everything will be shinier.
111. On that woman: she doesn’t have “an angle”. That’s what makes her so confusing.
112. Men should be humble as a sex; for every man is of woman born, and you know how women are always screwin’ stuff up.
113. Work is what it makes you.
114. The essence of heterosexuality is change.
115. Some days she wished that he had married her for her money.
116. She thinks her anger is the most attractive part of her. So she displays it.
117. Awareness is its own form of hope.
118. Independent of Aquinas: The tools of creation must be less yielding that the material to be shaped.
119. A kiss is not a contract.
120. These shoes make my feet look young. I like them.
121. Give Peace a Chance: How ’bout giving war some credit?
122. Whatever happened to the guy who was in love with Echo?
123. There is no 123.
124. Sex, like unhappiness, cannot be integrated into polite society.
125. Worry is how your mind keeps your body from getting ready.
126. On teenage personae: Substantive individuation is not the product of a contarian pallet – if one assumes that such a thing is advisable as a primary objective.
127. Fools. They blamed themselves rather than their actions for the results they received.
128. Suicide Note: I have run out of compassion for myself.
129. Science Fiction is a “B” genre because of its audience. So are soap operas.
130. The obsession is important. It covers the emptiness.
131. Love is the only fading thing that never disappears.
132. Only to a human being can “I am sick of you” and “I hate you” be mating behaviors.
133. The key to seduction is relaxed subterfuge.
134. The novice poet’s mistake:
This poem will not be great
Because it wasn’t exciting to create
135. There is nothing wrong with him that the right woman wouldn’t find adorable for a while.
136. The DSM-VI diagnosis for the House of David: Post Nomadic Stress Disorder.
137. To the artist in the marketplace: We cannot own our product; We can only own our work.
138. From Baseball: you cannot think and hit at the same time.
139. I feel so much warmth towards her it becomes heat.
140. She is pressing me like an apple that always wanted to be juice.
141. My body is a temple. Unfortunately it is Temple University.
142. Truth is what makes you stand up.
143. On the modern conventional radical: Why do they distrust the social behaviors that order the emotional life?
144.
145. Don’t confuse love and approval.
146. Watching the sunrise: Once I was delusional; now I know I have nothing
147. Don’t confuse the accelerant with the fire.
148. If you have never gotten laid as a direct result of a performance, you have no business trying to be a professional actor.
149. She is definitely thinking, but not particularly smart. A dangerous combination.
150. I was listening to Philip Glass, and I kept thinking that my cell phone was ringing.
151. I like his art. Nothing in it ever reminds me of life.
152. On story: Give me a riddle, good. Tell me a secret, better. Do both, best
153. We look for patterns to avoid the manifest shape of things and, sometimes vice-versa.
154. What is the embarrassment that some people have being moved by popular songs?
155. T-Shirt idea for the modern American campus: Have you disgraced you ancestors today?
156. If it is true dance it for me.
157. You really don’t know how you feel until something happens.
158. She spent her whole life being poised.
159. Don’t let your goals get in the way of what you want.
160. All I saw was someone trying to be good at something.
161. A hip-hop thought: “Murder is my name. Killing is my game. Consequently it is difficult for me to successfully purchase a sandwich”
162. You must share an expectation before you share a joke.
163. Your purpose may yield pleasure as long as pleasure is not your purpose.
164. Nice girl, always drank out of a glass.
165. After you shake hands with him – count your fingers.
167. How oft’ has hard won virtue run afoul of a long afternoon.
168. A man’s hunger is greater than his need to eat. Remember that son.
169. It is a sad man who choses his place on earth based solely on defensibility.
170. Woody Guthrie wrote: “this machine kills fascists”. Apparently, he meant his guitar. Silly me, I thought it was the Howitzer.
And one last one from the lovely Alisa Malinovich:
The key to success in America is to find something really really stupid
and take it really really seriously.
© 2007-2010 Kenan Minkoff
