Aphorisms at the voltage of a live wire.

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