**Nassim Taleb** Aphorisms, maxims, proverbs, short sayings, even, to some extent, epigrams are the earliest literary form - often integrated into what we now call poetry. They carry the cognitive compactness of the sound bite with some show of bravado in the ability of the author to compress powerful ideas in a handful of words. It has to be bravado, because the arabic word for an improvised one-liner is ‘act of manliness’, though such a notion of ‘manliness’ is less gender-driven than it sounds and can be equally translated as ‘the skills of being human’ (virtue has the same roots in Latin, vir, ‘man’). En la actualidad, se considera al aforismo como "la expresión concisa de una verdad subjetiva o una observación ingeniosamente expresada". El aforismo es un género de larga tradición que apunta a lo esencial del ser humano con un tono filosófico, moral, poético, ingenioso, y memorable. Elaborar un aforismo suele ser una operación lenta, costosa en rectificaciones. Es un género literario arcaico y poco vistoso. Joan Fuster [Umberto Eco](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/20/italian-author-umberto-eco-dies-aged-84) put it: “There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism.”