INSIGHTFUL THOUGHTS

I selected Insightful Thoughts (Myśli przenikliwe) toward the end of 2006, drawing from unpublished collections of aphorisms: The Blind Man with the Hourglass (Ślepiec z klepsydrą), A Commentary on the World (Komentarz do świata), Notes from the Hospice (Zapiski z hospicjum), and Hungry Fragments of Culture (Kawałki głodne kultury)-the fruit of reflections accumulated over two decades.

A few had appeared earlier in the published volume Aphorisms and Thoughts (Aforyzmy i myśli, Lublin: Wydawnictwo Test, 2002). For the most part, however, the present selection remained unknown to readers, surfacing only occasionally in my online writings.

I deliberately excluded materials from unpublished poetic sequences: Graphorisms (Graforyzmy) and Handcrafts (Rękodzieła), though fragments of these had circulated on the Poland-L discussion list. Each aphorism included here was selected purely on the basis of its epistemic resonance-whether it seemed to touch the essence of an elusive truth or merely grazed the contours of its form.

Originally published in Polish under the title Myśli Przenikliwe. Wybór myśli własnych, this volume appeared in Lublin (Norbertinum, 2009).

The English translation was completed only in June 2025, prompted by the growing visibility of some of these thoughts in Polish intellectual discourse. Their reach, I believe, ought not be confined to a national readership.

The selection that follows may be placed in dialogue with the finest aphorists I have admired since the 1970s. My engagement with this form-intensely literary, briefly philosophical-has always taken its bearings from the greatest names in the tradition:

Canetti, Karel Čapek, Anton P. Chekhov, Émile Michel Cioran, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Confucius and Disciples, Maria Dąbrowska, Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Henryk Elzenberg, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Witold Gombrowicz, Nikolai V. Gogol, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Baltasar Gracián y Morales, Christian Friedrich Hebbel, Hermann Hesse, Karol Irzykowski, Antoni Kępiński, Franz Kafka, Nicolas Chamfort, Stanisław Jerzy Lec, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Jean de La Bruyère, François de La Rochefoucauld, Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu, Luc de Clapiers (Vauvenargues), Muhammad, Novalis, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Schopenhauer, George Bernard Shaw, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Hugo Dionizy Steinhaus, Sun Tzu and Disciples, Aleksander Świętochowski, Paul Ambroise Valéry, Leo N. Tolstoy, Seneca the Younger, Karl Kraus, Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet).

-Ryszard Nowosielski