Nuggets for Gleaning

THE VIKING BOOK OF APHORISMS (405 pp.) -- Selected by W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger --Viking ($6.50).

An aphorism forces the eye off the page and into the contemplative middle distance; it takes a moment's time to decide whether the author has skewered a truth or merely shaken it up. The collectors have selected from the great aphorists such as G. K. Chesterton and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, but also from such little-known men of perception as Claude Bernard and the late Cesare Pavese.

Samplings :

> The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn. --Henry S. Haskins.

> To deprive elderly people of their bogeys is as brutal as snatching from babies their big stuffed bears. --L. P. Smith.

> Art is I; Science is We. --Claude Bernard.

> All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his. --Oscar Wilde.

> Perched on the loftiest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our own behind. --Montaigne.

> Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. --Emerson.

> The anarchist is disappointed with the future as well as the past. --Chesterton.

All in all, it is a book to beguile an idle interval, to start a line of thought, or at least to glean a nugget suitable for dropping into the next dinner-table pause.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.