Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The World in a Phrase
    Unavailable
    The World in a Phrase
    Unavailable
    The World in a Phrase
    Ebook282 pages4 hours

    The World in a Phrase

    By James Geary

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Starting with the ancient Chinese and ending with contemporary Europeans and Americans, The World in a Phrase tells the story of the aphorism through spirited and amusing biographies of some of its greatest practitioners, including Emily Dickinson, and Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker; great French aphorists like Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, and Chamfort; philosophers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein; as well as prophets and sages like the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Jesus. In our modern age, The World in a Phrase explores how aphorisms still retain the power to instigate and inspire, enlighten and enrage, entertain and edify.
    James Geary is the author of The Body Electric: An Anatomy of the New Bionic Senses. He lives in London with his wife and three children.
    "James Geary's celebration of the smallest-and sometimes wisest-of literary forms. Geary defines the characteristics of aphorisms and discusses their history and their role in his life, and shares the work of renowned aphorists from Buddha to Dr. Seuss."-Associated Press
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateFeb 1, 2011
    ISBN9781608197620
    Unavailable
    The World in a Phrase
    Author

    James Geary

    James Geary is the author of four previous books, including the New York Times bestseller The World in a Phrase, and is the deputy curator at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. A sought-after speaker and avid juggler, he lives near Boston, Massachusetts.

    Related to The World in a Phrase

    Related ebooks

    Games & Activities For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Kamil Ahsan

      Dec 21, 2018

      The majority of it was probably to offset the noise around me—but a not-insignificant minority was for inspiration, and for optimism. The post A Year in Reading: Kamil Ahsan appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      In Defense of Autodidacticism

      Oct 6, 2017

      Autodidacticism, I felt, was something miraculous, a mark of irrepressible curiosity, a way of slicing through disciplinary borders. The post In Defense of Autodidacticism appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Sophia Stewart

      Dec 22, 2022

      Sophia Stewart reflects on 2022 through the books she read. The post A Year in Reading: Sophia Stewart appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Art Of The Beachcomber

      May 12, 2023

      Research isn’t just for acquiring knowledge—it’s creatively generative, too The post The Art of the Beachcomber appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Eight Public Cases

      Dec 6, 2017

      Eight Public Cases
      5 min read

    • Article

      It’s Not You, It’s Me

      Sep 1, 2021

      Like many of you reading this, I mispronounced words growing up that I first encountered in books. These words gained a life of their own in the quiet hallways of my mind. This internal sense of sound and language had a tendency to trump the world’s,

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Chelsey Johnson

      Dec 13, 2018

      I launched a debut novel and bought three to five books at every store where I read on tour, so I struggle to even start to encapsulate this year in reading. And year-end lists tend to cycle around the same famous books again and again, so I’ll try n

      6 min read

    • Article

      Philologist Irene Vallejo: ‘Alexander The Great’s Library Was The First Step Towards The Internet’

      Nov 5, 2022

      Born in 1979, Irene Vallejo is a Spanish writer, historian and philologist, and a regular columnist in the newspaper El País. She had written several books, including novels, essays and children’s books before she published El infinito en un junco (I

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Poetry No. 111

      Sep 6, 2022

      The Art of Poetry No. 111
      26 min read

    • Article

      A Pained Intuition and a Palpable Longing: Katie Ford on Theology, Poetry, and the Unknowable

      Sep 13, 2018

      If You Have to Go, the new collection of poems by Katie Ford, is a book that conjures powers of possession. I feel that way about all of her books: Her poems bring me to a mystical plane somewhere between language and life. I’m left shaken. Her willi

      17 min read

    • Article

      Remember Reading in Public?

      Jul 27, 2020

      Remember Reading in Public?
      3 min read

    • Article

      Vagrant & Vulnerable

      Aug 16, 2017

      Vagrant & Vulnerable
      12 min read

    • Article

      To Retreat, or Not to Retreat?

      Sep 22, 2017

      RACHEL MABE JUNE OF 2016 FOUND ME lying on a twin-sized daybed on the third floor of an unfinished house in Marquette, Nebraska—a village of 230 whose sole purpose seemed to be the two-step monoculture of corn and soy. Flies slipped through the shodd

      8 min read

    • Article

      Shelf Life

      Apr 6, 2023

      Shelf Life
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Paper Wasp

      Jun 3, 2019

      The Paper Wasp
      13 min read

    • Article

      Airea D. Matthews

      Dec 13, 2017

      Yale University Press (Yale Series of Younger Poets) but I knew it was a winged thing, a puncture, a black and wicked door. —from “Rebel Prelude” HOW IT BEGAN: My life and the lives of the people who have affected me were the impetus for the book. I’

      1 min read

    • Article

      Louis Theroux

      Feb 21, 2022

      Louis Theroux
      5 min read

    • Article

      William Wall

      Feb 3, 2022

      William Wall
      3 min read

    • Article

      Airea D. Matthews

      Dec 5, 2017

      Yale University Press (Yale Series of Younger Poets) but I knew it was a winged thing, a puncture, a black and wicked door. —from “Rebel Prelude” HOW IT BEGAN: My life and the lives of the people who have affected me were the impetus for the book. I’

      1 min read

    • Article

      Writing From The Edge

      May 1, 2019

      One outreaches language in poetry when the inseeing elements of consciousness ask the unseen of life to come forward. My aim has been to unseat what we assume about time, about the verities of love and death, of the consciousness of those other senti

      9 min read

    Reviews for The World in a Phrase

    3.5/5

    22 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      This book interested me because I too am a collector of aphorisms. This entertaining little book offers lots of good sayings and interesting anecdotes.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I've said it before: I'm a big ol' word nerd. So of course this book on the history of the aphorism appealed to me. It turned out to be even better than I expected. In addition to defining and giving wonderful examples of aphorisms, this little volume provides a brief history of philosophy as well. Beginning with Lao-Tzu and Confucius, and progressing to modern poets and activists, Geary leads us through a history of thinkers and provides us with some of their most powerful words. I'm going to hold on to this book because I believe I'll want to refer to it again. For such a small book, it holds a great deal of fascinating information!

      2 people found this helpful