Two influential collections of aphorisms published in the twentieth century were The Uncombed Thoughts by Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (in Polish), and Itch of Wisdom by Mikhail Turovsky (in Russian and English).
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Other important early aphorists were Baltasar Gracián, François de La Rochefoucauld and Blaise Pascal.
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Aphoristic collections, sometimes known as wisdom literature, have a prominent place in the canons of several ancient societies, such as the Sutra literature of India, the Biblical Ecclesiastes, Islamic Hadith, The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, Hesiod's Works and Days, the Delphic maxims, and Epictetus' Handbook.
The new era name was drawn from an aphorism attributed to the ancient Chinese emperor, Great Shun (大舜): "Shun reads the Heavens, and so brings together all seven governments" (舜察天文、斉七政).
Carpe diem is an aphorism usually translated "seize the day", taken from a poem written in the Odes in 23 BC by the Latin poet Horace, Book 1, number 11.
Lord Acton's aphorism that "power tends to corrupt" has been used by critics of socialism to argue that the leadership of a socialist state would be more susceptible to corruption than others, because a socialist state has a broader scope than other states.
He also wrote a cycle of short, mostly satirical, aphorisms in the style of Voltaire, entitled Zrnka (Grains), which are still quoted sometimes.
Cirlot also cultivated aphorism in his book Del no mundo (1969), in which his thought can be traced back to its sources in Nietzsche and Lao Tse.
Lana and Andy Wachowski used one of the Latin versions (temet nosce) of this aphorism as inscription over the Oracle's door in their movies The Matrix (1999) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003).
He began his artistic endeavors with hundreds of poetic aphorisms graffitied in Downtown Los Angeles and the Mission District of San Francisco at the same time as other California "outsider artists" like Joey Krebs, "Chaka" and Robbie Conal.
In 1403 Nicholas Ó hÍceadha (with Boulger O'Callahan) wrote a commentary on the Aphorism of Hippocrates, a fragment of which is still preserved in the British Museum, London.
He has been awarded in 1988 with the special prize for the Black Aphorism at the festival in Vogošća just like in the following year.
The Greek lyricist Archilochus provided the inspiration for the name of the journal, when he wrote this aphorism: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."