Where to bury our brains in this hour of dread – not to escape, evade, ignore, forget, but for relief, so, fortified by absence, may return to the fray refreshed?

I’m an aphorism addict. Proverb, epigram, maxim, apothegm, witticism are versions of the same creature, a surprising truth honed to memorable pith. Funny, biting, bitter, or poignant, they zing and sting like darts.

I can’t resist them. They goad my mind alert. I envy, admire, emulate their makers, though the know-it-alls I loathe. La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche, and Oscar Wilde, to name three, are often cruel in their cleverness.

Some sadden. Smart, they couldn’t make anything big: quips are not literature. The Reverend Caleb Charles Colton, whom I happened on recently, is one such.

Colton (1771-1832) was an Englishman, born to modest privilege, educated at the best schools (Eton and Cambridge). A “perpetual curacy” enabled him to earn a spare living without much sweat. Sometimes he was attentive to his duties, at other times, erratic. He quit the church in 1828, probably pursued by creditors, and fled to America. He shows up later in Paris, a picture collector, wannabe bon vivant, and successful – then unsuccessful – gambler. Sick and unable to afford a life-saving operation, he killed himself.

Colton published two books of aphorisms, which he called Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words: Addressed to Those Who Think. Lacon was a second-century BCE philosopher of whom little’s known – a rueful reminder, we suppose, of Colton to himself. While Colton’s books were popular, today he survives only in quote compilations. I envision him as chafing in his life, the smartest guy in the room but angry, sad, a Romantic with insufficient genius – a melancholy improviser, bristling with hopes and maddened by his obscurity.

I bought a cheap facsimile of Lacon – amazing what technology can supply. It felt lonely visiting. Who else, I wondered, had eyed these words recently? I read with interest, but not enough interest to persist. Here and there Colton’s brilliant, but too often his a-hahs are ho-hums or he indulges in conventional misogyny, which puts me off. Sneering at women has been a staple of male authors since the ancients.

Instead of reading Colton’s book, I browsed him on the Internet. Online quote sites permit erudition lite. His best-known aphorism still glitters: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” I collected a posy of others you might enjoy. It warms me not to forget this sad wry also-ran in the scrum of letters.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedIf we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.

In life we shall find many men that are great, and some that are good, but very few men that are both great and good.

If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city.

We hate some persons because we do not know them; and will not know them because we hate them.

Silence is foolish if we are wise, but wise if we are foolish.

To dare to live alone is the rarest courage: since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.

Books, like friends, should be few and well-chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us – never cease to instruct – never cloy.

When you have nothing to say, say nothing.

None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them.

Wealth after all is a relative thing since he that has little and wants less is richer than he that has much and wants more.

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.

Many speak the truth when they say that they despise riches, but they mean the riches possessed by others.

We ask advice, but we mean approbation.

That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.

Suicide sometimes proceeds from cowardice, but not always; for cowardice sometimes prevents it; since as many live because they are afraid to die, as die because they are afraid to live.