BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Grooks - love them

No, not people who are dishonest and criminal. It's Grooks. They are the creation of Piet Hein (16 December 1905 – 18 April 1996), the wonderful Danish polymath who was a mathematician, scientist, inventor, and poet. These little poems are "characterized by irony, paradox, brevity, precise use of language, sophisticated rhythms and rhymes, and an often satiric nature." Although Hein was a Dane, many of the grooks were written in English.

How often do you see a poem where the title is the same length as the poem?

Nothing Is Indespensable : Grook to warn the universe against megalomania
The universe may
be as great as they say.
But it wouldn't be missed
if it didn't exist.

Don't we all know of people like this?

THE CENTRAL POINT
A philosophistry

I am the Universe's Centre.
No subtle sceptics can confound me;
for how can other viewpoints enter,
when all the rest is all around me?

-Piet Hein

Physics in a nutshell.

Atomyriades

Nature, it seems is the popular name
for milliards and milliards and milliards
of particles playing their infinite game
of billiards and billiards and billiards.

-Piet Hein

It's true that the more we know the more we realize that we don't know.

The Only Solution
We shall have to evolve
problem-solvers galore -
since each problem they solve
creates ten problems more.

-Piet Hein

I have enough trouble standing on my feet, could never manage to stand on my head. But I agree that a change of perspective can be enlightening.

ASTRO-GYMNASTICS

Go on a starlit night,
stand on your head,
leave your feet dangling
outwards into space,
and let the starry
firmament you tread
be, for the moment,
your elected base.

Feel Earth's colossal weight
of ice and granite,
of molten magma,
water, iron, and lead;
and briefly hold
this strangely solid planet
balanced upon
your strangely solid head.

-Piet Hein

A philosophical thought.

OUT OF TIME
(A holiday thought)

My old clock used to tell the time
and subdivide diurnity;
but now it's lost both hands and chime
and only tells eternity.

-Piet Hein

Problems

Problems worthy
of attack
prove their worth
by hitting back.

-Piet Hein

VITA BREVIS

A lifetime
is more
than
sufficiently long
for people to get what there is of it
wrong.

-Piet Hein

Love your sayings.

Angie, glad you're enjoying them. I was first introduced to them long ago when I was in college. They are funny, incicive and thoughtful - and written by someone whose native language isn't English. But a very clever man. They used to say that a clever after-dinner speaker was one who could give a talk without quoting Piet Hein!

THOSE WHO KNOW

Those who always
know what’s best
are
a universal pest.

Piet Hein