Flash Wisdom

A book that furnishes no quotations is,
me judice, no book—it is a plaything.

I'm a quotation junkie. Growing up surrounded by books, I gravitated to the quote collections on the family bookshelves, including the doorstoppers The International Dictionary of Thought and The Great Quotations (the latter compiled in the 1960s by the great investigative journalist George Seldes). When I was at my grandparents' house, I'd turn to the “Quotable Quotes” section of Reader's Digest. Whenever an issue of The Sun is within reach, I head to the last page, “Sunbeams,” a collection of quotes, usually on that issue's theme.

I also like lists, bullet points, fortune-cookie fortunes, bumper stickers, Dr. Bronner's soap labels, flash cards, microfiction, trivia books. I prefer short stories to novels, short films to feature films, haiku and quatrains to five-page poems, Hemingway to Joyce. Maybe that's why I drink spirits, not wine or beer. Distill things for me. Boil them down to their essences. Take out the dross, the impurities, the filler.

I like wisdom that way, too. I probably don't have time for an 800-page treatise on the intricate meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Don't make me wait for that epiphany. Give me your insight in an instant.

The best quotes are the ones that crystallize a truth, that offer a new way of seeing things, or that point out something that you've always known even though the thought has never fully formed in your mind. Suddenly, there it is on the page. In a compact form. Your perspective shifts.

This effect has long been noted with regard to books. The great 20th-century novelist and essayist James Baldwin said: “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone.”

Excellent quotations offer the same thing—the same sense of connection, the same insight into the human condition—in a tiny format, much easier to encounter and quicker to absorb than a book.

That concision is undoubtedly the biggest selling point of quotes, maxims, aphorisms, and proverbs. Easy to ingest. Easy to remember. Available to interject into a conversation at a moment's notice. You can sprinkle them throughout your own writing or talks and lectures, tape them to your bathroom mirror, use them to sign off your emails (in your “sig line”), tweet them....

The rise of social media has led to a resurgence in the quoting of quotes. Twitter, with its limit of 140 characters, is a natural habitat for quotations. Facebook doesn't have a hard-and-fast maximum, but it does reward brevity. Both sites allow posting of small images, and those images are often quotations, usually accompanied by or overlaying a photo. These sites are chockablock with quotations from the past 3,000 years.

While social networks, JPEGs, and email sig lines provide the ideal platform for short bits of text, people's love of quotations goes way back. Lifting one, two, or three sentences (occasionally more) out of a much larger text and pinning it to a new page like a butterfly is a millennia-long pursuit. In his book The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture, Northwestern University professor Gary Saul Morson reveals that collections of quotations existed in ancient times; they were especially popular in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; the first book printed in Britain was, in fact, a compendium of quotations from the great philosophers. John Bartlett—the 19th-century bookseller whose name has become synonymous with quotation collections—was actually taking part in a long tradition.

So what do I look for in quotations? How did I select the ones for Flash Wisdom?

I started with my favorites, the ones that have moved me the most through the years. Helen Schucman on the overriding importance not of seeking love but of tearing down our internal barriers against it. André Gide's exhortation: “Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.” Thoreau on the true price of anything (“the amount of life you exchange for it”). Leonard Cohen on acceptance (“If you don't become the ocean you'll be seasick every day.”), and Chuck Palahniuk on materialism (“The things you own end up owning you.”). Pablo Neruda's 1924 declaration/offer to his lover—“I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”—which I'm told is still being used by Lotharios throughout South America. Bruce Lee's stirring reminder: “In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.” Yoko Ono's surprisingly difficult instruction: “Try to say nothing negative about anybody for three days, for forty-five days, for three months. See what happens to your life.” The harsh medicine offered by a bumper-sticker I saw around twenty years ago: “The only common denominator in all your fucked-up relationships is you.” William Blake's support of “the road of excess,” and George Eliot's note of hope to those of us who are no longer spring chickens: “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

From there, I started buying and checking out quotation books by the armful. I dove into the bottomless pit that is Wikiquote. I asked people I know for the quotes that mean the most to them. I found gems that I'd forgotten, and discovered loads more that resonated with me. Not that I'm convinced that every quotation I selected is the truth (whatever that is). Many seem to hit the proverbial nail on the head. Others are obvious overstatements, but they contain enough truth to be worth pondering. A handful might even be completely wrongheaded . . . but they make points that I can't easily dismiss.

I banished the twee, the clichéd, the cynical, the too-clever. You might disagree, of course. One person's treasure is another person's twaddle. I tried to stick with the most eloquent, the punchiest, the most honest, and/or the most insightful and revealing.

Because of quotations in this book, I've changed my outlook on life, or at least certain aspects of it. I've put new approaches into practice. I look at other people and their actions in different ways.

Many of the best quotes are like the best poems: they point to a truth, but they don't spell it out. You get an insight, but it's up to you to figure out what to do with it, how to implement it. Take this quote from Dostoevsky: “Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.” I hear this as a call to speak important things, and to speak them clearly, to people who are important to us. But how exactly do we do this? He doesn't tell us. Obviously we can't say literally everything that's unsaid . . . none of us would be silent for even a moment. This titan of Russian literature is implying that a few crucial things are going unsaid. What those things are, and how and when to say them . . . well, that's up to each of us to decide.

A small number of these quotes, however, do offer explicit advice. Sylvia Plath recommends hot baths as a panacea for whatever ails us, physically or emotionally. Hemingway commands us to shut up and truly listen to other people. Napoleon advises us to never make promises.

Taking the opposite approach, a tiny portion of these bon mots are highly abstract. Octavio Paz's meditation on the nature of the romantic couple (“the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms”) comes to mind. As does J. Krishnamurti's famous, defining statement: “Truth is a pathless land.”

The vast majority of quotes in this book, though, sprawl over the spectrum between concrete, actionable advice and mystical obliqueness.

If a light going on in someone's eyes has ever literally happened, then I saw it happen at a garden party. A community activist was there—a builder of metaphorical bridges—so I relayed a Lincoln quote: “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?” There was a pause. I could see him processing. Then he smiled hugely, his eyes sparkling. “Ahhh. Yes!”

I know that feeling well. Here's hoping it happens at least once to each reader of this book.

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoevsky.

This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone.

This is why art is important.

—James Baldwin

INTRODUCTION