Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists

By James Geary

(Bloomsbury, 437 pages, $20)

Who said "A poem is always married to someone"? An aphorist, of course—in this case, René Char, a French Surrealist poet. He is one of more than 350 wordsmiths found in Geary's fun and indispensable book containing thousands of the world's witticisms. Geary, a former journalist, has improved on most standard anthologies by including short biographies of his aphorists. And he not only cross-references authors and their subjects but also catalogs aphorists by "species"—among them, comics, critics, satirists, painters, and poets. Mae West shows up with the iconoclasts for her observation "Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before."

While the likes of Aristotle and Mark Twain are here, the book also plies obscure waters, with sayings from wits who normally don't make these collections. Geary broadened his range by doing original research, scouring libraries and private collections for lesser-known works and often translating them himself. One complaint: He sometimes reaches a little far. Wrenching aphorisms from the Hávamál, an epic ninth-century Scandinavian poem, brings us such lines as "The lame rides a horse, the maimed drives the herd, the deaf is brave in battle."

Still, all writers should own this book, and readers too can reap its real joy, which is to meander through a distillation of the world's collected wisdom in about 400 pages.