APHORISMS

Speak only when you are sure that you have nothing important to say.

To save ourselves we believe in the strangest teachings, as long as they do not expect us to give up anything.

No point in calling a man honest, if he speaks the truth only because he does not know how to lie.

If I committed suicide, I would do it out of fear of death or curiosity.

I am at my most poetic at the graveyard.

We live in order to say the last words.

We can choose what we eat, not what is served at table.

I did not get everything I wanted; only what I needed.

You cannot make a flower grow faster by pulling at it with pliers.

Drunks and criminals are not as good human beings as we are; they are as bad.

Do not call life absurd, because there is no life. There is only your life.

Beware of starving to death while pondering on the innermost nature of bread.

It's not the drinking you should believe in. Believe in the water, and drink!

Our only freedom: to give before it is taken.

Happiness is not a duty.

The spotlights of reason sweep the strange room of reality. Pity on those who try to understand.

Names recur, phenomena don't.

Time: the world entering memory.

Nothing can recur, because nothing ends.

We have been made the keepers of so much. From a moment's passion an immortal soul is born into everlasting pain or glory.

A murderer deprives his victim of the only thing that is really his, his death.

Death nails our deeds as theses on the gates of heaven.

Such a busy man, even after his death he took three steps.

I would like to be killed in battle for the right cause, if only I could think of a right cause.

We are all disabled soldiers, to the third and fourth generation.

Truth makes free, not being right.

Many people think as if they were walking by lifting their feet with their hands.

They exchange opinions like schoolgirls exchange pictures of pop stars.

He took the highest degree in astronomy and became a night watchman.

As a child I though of a way to survive unhurt if the lift fell from the sixth floor: just before the bottom of the shaft I would jump up in the air and only fall half a meter. I still feel a temptation to believe, that it would work.

In order not to forget the vanity of life, the Egyptian Desert Fathers watered dead sticks, which they had planted in the sand. Be forever remembered, ye true Protestants.

As such it makes no difference if at the other end of Adam's umbilical cord there was an ape or a handful of earth. As a poem the history of the creation is more beautiful.

On an autumn evening I light the lamp in my room. The light flows from the window into the darkness. The darkness does not flow inside. There is no darkness. There is only light and lack of light.

The biggest shock of my childhood I received in the observatory when I saw that the stars have no points.

I am not The Ruler. My loneliness is of a different kind.

A supporter, the most terrible of all deceptions.

Esau sold his inheritance for a dishful of soup; many a believer tries to buy his equally cheap.

Despair is born of the fear, that death after all is not the end of everything.


We refuse death and resurrection.
We try to make ourselves as comfortable as possible on the cross.

The present day feeding miracle: five loaves of bread and two circus-games.

We embrace each other over an abyss. If we let go, we fall.

We listen side by side to each other's silence.

How long must the silence last before we can conclude that the discussion has ended?

It is worth while explaining things only to those, for whom it is not necessary to explain.

Aphorisms from the collections Hyppynarun varjo [The Shadow of the Skipping Rope], Nuorallatanssija [The Tight Rope Walker], Kuolemattomat sielut [The Immortal Souls] and Mahdolliset maailmat [The Possible Worlds].