An aphorism can be its own example, as this one is.

I sense the oakleaves of Dodona quivering, feel pregnant with a gnomic whopper: Nope, false alarm.

Evasion is sometimes the best defense.

Do not imagine that because polymathy may sometimes impede wisdom, vacuity is therefore its most comfortable couch.

One cannot dynamite the mountain stream for golddust. One cannot pan the inflexible rock.

Time spent is pocketed by memory.

Are you following me? said the blind man to the man of intolerable gaze who his his eyes under a smoking cowl behind him. Yes, says he, I got one eye peeped like a compass-needle on the roaddusty callous of your left heel. Begob, says the blind man, so that’s how I got the blister and me not ten miles near the chafe of a walking man’s shoes.

Those who understood the preceding may pss on to the next aphorism. Those who did not are wise enough already and require no further instruction.

Men lack either steerage or wind.

Cadence impersonates wisdom. Aridity impersonates persuasiveness. Such are impersonations of rhetoric and proof respectively.

The void is lubricated against every reluctance.

One cannot pry open a locked door with a flashlight beam. One cannot find a lost key in the dark without a crowbar.

Epighram affords no vacancy to parenthesis.

This elephant walks into a bar, see. The bartender thinks it must have escaped from the nearby zoo, but when the animal sits down and orders a drink, he then suspects himself the victim of a gag. He leans over the bar, grabs the tarplike ears and begins yanking at what he takes to be a mask. One hears a muffled, flustered and indignant flurry of trumpeting loosely shaping itself into the words: “Good Lord, man, if you don’t have Guiness, I’ll take whatever’s on tap!”