of Beloved Aphorisms from
Dandiananda, The Sage of the West.
Feel free to share.
Chloé von Graffenried are here.
I
Life is but a small part of Art.
Sometimes the most open mind is firmly shut.
Faith is but a nightlight for those afraid of the dark.
There are no Mondays in the universe.
You have to let go, to better hold on.
There is nothing so loud as silence.
Never let reality intrude upon your dreams.
Life is Myth.
The best advice is not to give advice.
We are so much more, when we believe so much less.
II
Why think outside the box, when there is no box?
Never confuse accolade for accomplishment.
Be as concerned with your death as you were with your birth.
You can love and be loved by a dog, but you can only worship a cat.
A leaf, falling to the ground, does not add to the weight of the world.
We feel it, but no one has ever seen the wind.
What does not serve us must be abandoned.
All religions share the false belief that death is a state of being.
Sorrow and happiness often share a bed.
One can never have too much beauty.
III
Art is not entertainment.
The eating of animals is as reprehensible as it is indefensible.
Love before Death, and Art above all.
Life owes you nothing.
Fate is simply what happens.
The only thing we can read in the stars is our cosmic insignificance.
To remember the essential you must forget the mundane.
Come winter, Death gains a step on us all.
At this moment, on a billion planets, revolving around their distant suns, another sorry creature, invents another insignificant god.
People are most jealous when you love yourself.
IV
To understand the rain you must get wet.
Your possessions possess you.
Love makes sweet fools of us all.
Philosophy unlived is mere observation.
Action, never prayer.
Many are called but few are chosen.
Most “free spirits” are chained to a desk.
A million praying people can’t accomplish the work of a single doctor.
Without limits on wealth you get limitless poverty.
If you got out of bed this morning, you are an optimist.
V
Prayer is a conversation between the delusional and the nonexistent.
I love everything about opera except the singing.
I am an Artist, a minor sort of god.
Philanthropy is giving dry bread to those dying of thirst.
Truth: the unwelcome stranger, the uninvited guest.
Beauty kills, she takes no prisoners.
Racism. Sexism. Speciesism. The only difference is the victim.
Genius suffers no compromise.
The words "religion" and "cult" are synonyms.
Love is the subjugation of self.
VI
Somewhere, in a distant galaxy, a rogue asteroid begins a billion year journey towards Earth, bringing our unnoticed and meaningless annihilation.
Wisdom often arrives late.
Love is not friendship.
Give everyone a chance, some a second, and none a third.
True nobility needs no titles.
Real sincerity requires the most consummate acting.
People who don't hold a grudge keep it in their back pocket.
Genius doesn't pay the rent.
The voice of reason is quickly drowned out by the choir of idiots.
You will learn more from the King's Fool than from the King.
VII
Nothing of real value is for sale.
Art has its own truth.
True love is fatal and reserved for the poets.
Finish things or they will finish you.
There is nothing quite so pleasing as quoting oneself.
The true Artist has an audience of one.
Defund the rich.
Artificial intelligence is fine, our problem is natural stupidity.
No, time is not money, that's why we have two different words.
Why read between the lines when there's nothing written there?
VIII
Evil, a form of disorder, never lasts.
Bravery needs but an instant, cowardice lasts forever.
Alcohol is a sad and pathetic religion.
You arrive sooner when you have no destination.
All our tears flow into the same ocean.
Young men die for old men's politics.
To best enjoy a party, come late and leave early.
A tattoo on a beautiful woman is vandalism.
Our smallest actions make or unmake us.
When you fall, and you will certainly fall, get back on your horse.
IX
Truth simply exists, but lies must be created.
The Artist’s primary relationship is with their art.
The universe has a where, a when, a how, and a what...
but there is no why.
To "change the world", you must change yourself.
Go where no one can follow.
Intelligence, natural or artificial, is rare.
Advice is easily shared, but wisdom defies transmission.
Add money and a cult become a religion.
Love is the ultimate kink.
Governance, not politics.
X
The biggest lesson of history,
is that we don't learn lessons from history.
As a wrong note disturbs the music,
a wrong thought disturbs the mind.
Aphorisms at the voltage of a live wire.
The collection - monastic in its restraint - keeps the sayings unmediated, and the result is a voice that seems both distilled and deliberately unplaceable. The introductory legend calls this “a curated collection” and names the figure “Sage of the West,” which is as much mask as biography; the mystery is not a gap but a strategy, inviting us to read the corpus rather than the life.The strongest axioms conduct austere, anti-therapeutic ethics. “Action, never prayer.” is the book’s flint, striking against passivity in a dozen domains. Its bracing cousin - about a million praying people and a single doctor - makes the point with surgical clarity. This is not theology-baiting for sport, but an insistence on agency: the world yields, and moves forward, by the pen sword.
Equally enigmatic is “Art is not entertainment.” The sentence appears plain until one feels its exclusions: it rejects consolation and treats attention as a moral resource. In that spirit, “The true Artist has an audience of one.” reads as the corollary, protecting the maker from the market and the metric. These are not workshop slogans; they are operating instructions for a vocation that prefers seriousness to spectacle.
Several aphorisms aim at metaphysical housekeeping—quick cuts that clear away counterfeit meanings. “There are no Mondays in the universe.” dismantles our bureaucratic despair with a cosmological shrug; the calendar is revealed as a provincial custom, not an ontology. Likewise, “The universe has a where, a when, a how, and a what… but there is no why.” refuses the comfort of teleology and leaves us with the sobering freedom of description without purpose. The wit is dry, but the philosophical intent is pure crystal.
Other lines reveal a countervailing tenderness that keeps the collection from hardening into harsh severity. “A leaf, falling to the ground, does not add to the weight of the world.” is a miniature of moral poise - lightness as a discipline, not denial. And if “Life is but a small part of Art.” sounds like manifesto, it also redeems the ordinary by subsuming it in a larger, patient attention: life becomes the medium in which form is learned and tested.
As for Dandiananda, the biographical silence feels intentional. On the site’s artist page we learn only that the aphorisms were “archived over many years” and presented for sharing; the persona persists as a house oracle, a signature that withholds a signer. In an era addicted to authorial overshare, this restraint is refreshing. It pressures us to engage with sentences, not celebrity, and to judge the thought by its tensile strength rather than by the persona of its maker.
If the collection has a fault, it is the occasional relish for absolutism; but even here the excess serves the purpose, like overexposure in a photograph that teaches you where the light is. Virtually all pages of “inspirational quotes” dissolve into syrup. This one resists. It prefers quarrel to comfort, and clarity to charm.
How else to end but with this bon mot from the collection?
"Art has its own truth."
— Chloé von Graffenried, Gstaad