Which is clearer, what we see or what we don't see?

1. If you can't take the first step, take the second.
2. Experience afraid of its innocence is useless; no one is rich who cannot give his riches away.
3. My mistakes are not mine, but they are embarrassing because you might mistake them for my sins, which are.
4. Sophistication is upscale conformity.
5. The days are in order, the months, the seasons, the years. But the weeks are work. They have no names; they repeat.
6. Too much apology doubles the offense.
7. Hard disk: the letter I remembered as embarrassing is OK after all. I must have revised it just before sending. I never confuse what I dreamed with what I actually did, but this is different: which draft am I?
8. What is more yours than what holds you back?
9. Few plans survive their first success, which suggests they were less about their goals than about the possibility of a little success.
10. The heart is a small, cracked cup, easy to fill, impossible to keep full.
11. How proud we are of our multitasking. What is Life but something to get off our desks, cross off our lists?
12. The reader lives faster than life, the writer lives slower.
13. I need someone above me--the Committee, the Law, Money, Time--to be able to say No. Sad my lack of integrity, though I suppose it would be sadder to need them to say Yes.
14. Self-sufficiency clings...to itself.
15. If you do more than your share you'd better want to: otherwise you're paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.
16. Beware speaking of The Rich as if they were someone else.
17. We've learned to wonder which neutralizes truth more effectively, the tyranny's censorship or the democracy's ten thousand media outlets. In the former truth is too costly, in the latter there's no market for it. In Freud the facts get around the censor in the metaphor of dreams, in Shelley we live in a dream of overfamiliarity and dead metaphor that only the poet can revivify. Does repetition emphasize or hypnotize? Which is clearer, what we see or what we don't see? Are we new or old? Do we love hate or hate love?
18. You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don't.
19. The peril of arguing with you is forgetting to argue with myself. Don't make me convince you: I don't want to believe that much.
20. Tyranny and fantasy both like to write everyone's lines.
21. Roadkill. Something eats the eyes first, starved for...what?
22. As a couple they are the salt of the earth, sodium chloride. As single elements, she was a poisonous gas and he a soft and desperate metal, turning even water into roil and flame.
23. Don't touch, don't stare. But no one minds how hard you listen.
24. That book, that woman, life: now that I understand them a little I realize there was something I understood better when they baffled and scared me.
25. Nostalgia for a Lost Love. At a certain distance the parts of you and her that could never love each other become invisible, which is how you got into that whole mess in the first place.
26. Freedom has just escaped. Peace has forgotten. Boredom is pounding on the prison gates to be let back in.
27. It is with poetry as with love: forcing yourself is useless, you have to want to. Yet how tiresome and ungenerous is the one sprawled among flowers waiting for his impulse. There's such a thing as knowing how to make yourself want to.
28. I'm forced to admit I'm second rate: I don't have the genius's certainty about who he is. And when I talk myself into that certainty? I'm third rate.
29. Solitude: that home water whose sweetness you taste only when you've been someone else too long.
30. It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.
31. No one in human history has ever written exactly this sentence. Or anyway these two.
32. Sure, no one's listening, English will die in a hundred years, and the far future is stones and rays. But here's the thing, you Others, you Years to Come: you do not exist.

[James Richardson, 'Even More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays from Vectors 3.0', from By the Numbers]