Hello friends and poets. Today I wanted us to write aphorisms.

Even is you don’t know it, you probably use aphorisms in your everyday life, in your writing as well as with friends.

According to the definition, an aphorism is a statement that presents a moral or philosophical idea. It does that with a pithy statement that expresses something general idea of the world by for instance being a metaphor.

Take for example: “The grass is always greener on the other side (of the fence)”

Picture by James Rickwood – Flickr: P*ssed again!

which many of you would (rightly) say is nowadays an idiom, and if someone says “the grass is always greener…”, in response to someone expressing envy or dissatisfaction with what they have we all know what it means.

However, most aphorisms will not become part of the general language and will remain part of literature. As an example fables are often concluded with an aphorism to summarize the conclusions of the story, for example:

Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.

Comes from the fable about the milkmaid and her pail, telling the story of how a milkmaid carrying a pail of milk to the market starts to scheme about what she would do with the money she would get for the milk and lost in her thought she trips spilling out all the milk.

I know that many of you use quotes as part of your poems and very often these quotes can be seen as aphorisms.

Today I would like you to formulate your own aphorism and publish them on your blog. If you want to, please add a short piece of prose explaining your aphorism.

I hope this sounds like fun, and I hope to find many good examples of new aphorisms. If this is too challenging for you, you may (as an option) take an existing aphorism and reformulate it into something new. If you opt to do that please refer to the original one.

When you are ready to publish them to your blog, link them back dVerse, put your link in Mr. Linky below, and then read and enjoy. Maybe these aphorisms will inspire your own poetry,