Mardy Grothe - Ifferisms: An Anthology of Aphorisms That Begin with the Word IF

If Anything Can Go Wrong, It Will

(Classic Ifferisms)

If It Bends, Its Funny; If It Breaks, It Isnt

(Wit & Wordplay)

If It Is to Be, It Is Up to Me

(Words to Live By)

If Men Could Learn from History, What Lessons It Might Teach Us

(The Human Condition)

If You Cant Be Kind, At Least Be Vague

(Not-So-Iffy Advice)

If You Rest, You Rust

(Ages & Stages of Life)

If His IQ Slips Any Lower, Well Have to Water Him Twice a Day

(Critical & Insulting Ifferisms)

If the World Were a Logical Place, Men Would Ride Side-Saddle

(Gender Dynamics)

If You Want to Have a Friend, Be a Friend

(Human Relationships)

If I Dont Do It Every Day, I Get a Headache

(Sex, Love & Romance)

If You Marry for Money, You Will Earn Every Penny

(Marriage, Home & Family Life)

If Winning Isnt Important, Why Do They Keep Score?

(Sports Ifferisms)

If You Want a Friend in Washington, D.C., Get a Dog

(Politics & Government)

If You Cant Do Anything Else, Theres Always Acting

(Stage & Screen)

If You Arent Fired with Enthusiasm, Youll Be Fired with Enthusiasm

(Business & Management)

If You Add to the Truth, You Subtract from It

(Oxymoronic & Paradoxical Ifferisms)

If Your Head Is Wax, Dont Walk in the Sun

(Metaphorical Ifferisms)

If You Cant Annoy Somebody, There Is Little Point in Writing

(The Literary Life)

D o you know what an aphorism is?

When I began work on this book a few years ago, I asked hundreds of people this simple question. Im not quite sure what I expected, but I was surprised by the large number of people who hesitated, and then hemmed and hawed before saying something like, I know what it is, but Im having trouble putting it into words. Try the question on some of your friends. You may be surprised.

Technically, an aphorism (AFF-uhr-IZ-uhm) is a brief observation that attempts to communicate some kind of truth about the human experience:

Contact with the world either breaks or hardens the heart .

NICOLAS CHAMFORT

To measure the man, measure his heart.

MALCOLM FORBES

The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world.

JOSEPH CONRAD

He has the right to criticize who has the heart to help.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

The heart has reasons that the reason knows not of.

BLAISE PASCAL

The American Heritage Dictionary defines an aphorism as a tersely phrased statement of a truth or opinion; an adage. Like so many dictionary definitions, though, this is a bit of a yawner. Butappropriately, I thinksome of the best descriptions of aphorisms have been expressed aphoristically:

An aphorism is the last link in a long chain of thought.

MARIE VON EBNER-ESCHENBACH

The aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general.

STEFAN KANFER

A slightly longerbut equally memorabledescription comes from James Geary, who wrote in The World in a Phrase: A History of the Aphorism (2005):

Aphorisms are literatures hand luggage.
Light and compact, they fit easily into the overhead compartment of your brain and contain everything you need to get through a rough day at the office or a dark night of the soul.

While aphorism is the noun, aphoristic is the adjective. A person who creates aphorisms is called an aphorist , and writers who pen them are said to write aphoristically . Many literary giantssuch as Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shawhave been drawn to the writing of these little gems. Friedrich Nietzsche, another master of the form, hinted at the motivation of many aphorists when he said, My ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book. And if you think terse and pithy sayings are trivial, consider what Samuel Taylor Coleridge had to say on the subject:

The largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms.

A synonym for aphorism is epigram , and they are also known as maxims and adages . They were once commonly called apothegms (APP-uh-thums), but that word has completely dropped out of favor. Many aphorisms have gained such a widespread currency they are called proverbs, axioms , or truisms . Some have a guide-your-life quality, and are given the honorific title of precept or dictum . And some are so popular they become victims of their own success and are dismissed or disparaged as platitudes, bromides, or clichs. Whatever theyre called, succinctly phrased sayings have an honored place in intellectual history.

At the beginning of the chapter, I presented five aphorisms on the subject of the human heart. Below are five more. Notice the one thing they have in common:

If a good face is a letter of recommendation, a good heart is a letter of credit.

EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON

If your heart has peace, nothing can disturb you.

THE DALAI LAMA

If it were not for hopes, the heart would break.

THOMAS FULLER, M.D.

If you havent any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.

BOB HOPE

If the heart be right, it matters not which way the head lies.

WALTER RALEIGH

All of these observations, of course, begin with the word if . I have coined the term ifferism for this kind of aphorism, and I intend to celebrate them in this book. While most aphorisms do not begin with the word if , there are many thousands that doand they are among historys most compelling quotations:

If you can put the question,
Am I or am I not responsible for my acts?
then you are responsible.

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

If you do not tell the truth about yourself
you cannot tell it about other people .

VIRGINIA WOOLF

The following ifferismssome of which will be explored in more detail in a later chapterhave achieved a classic status in popular culture:

If it aint broke, dont fix it.

If anything can go wrong, it will.

If life hands you lemons, make lemonade.

If momma aint happy, aint nobody happy .

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is .

Some others are enormously thought provoking:

If merely feeling good could decide,
drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

WILLIAM JAMES

If man does find the solution for world peace it will be the most revolutionary reversal of his record we have ever known.

GEORGE C. MARSHALL

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem,
it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.

STANLEY KUBRICK

Some of the most famous biblical passages are ifferisms:

If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch .

MATTHEW 15:14

If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand .

MARK 3:25

And, finally, some are among the worlds most popular proverbs:

If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day;
if you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime.

CHINESE PROVERB

If a man deceives me once, shame on him;
if he deceives me twice, shame on me.

ITALIAN PROVERB

At the beginning of my quotation-collecting career many decades ago, I noticed that a fair number of my favorite observations were introduced with the word if . I didnt give the matter a whole lot of thought back then, but I did think it was of enough potential interest that I created a manila folderand later a computer fileto store what I was calling at the time iffy quotations. The number of quotations in that file has mushroomed over the years, and my thinking about them has evolved. I now understand the critical role that this simple two-letter word plays in human discourse, and I have come to believe that if is the biggest little word in the English language. It is an essential tool when people engage in hypothetical or counterfactual thinking and when they make conditional statements.