"Nothing seems to me to be rarer today than genuine hypocrisy."

From a list of 35 aphorisms about lying.

But none of the aphorisms on the list is the aphorism I am looking for. You know the feeling that there is an aphorism that's already out there for something you're trying to say in aphorism form. You can say it briefly, but not in the words that must be in the aphorism.

Here's as close as I can get to saying what seems to me to be a rough paraphrase for a reasonably well-known aphorism: He who lies about small things will lie about big things. Or: Little lies foretell big lies.

What I'm looking for is the "Where there's smoke, there's fire" of lying.

There should be a word for the feeling that there is already an aphorism for the idea that you could express in your own words. That feeling inhibits the composition of one's own new aphorism. I mean, if you were trying to remember the aphorism "Where there's smoke, there's fire" and instead wrote the notion up in your own snappy words, it would never replace "Where there's smoke, there's fire." "Where there's smoke, there's fire" is so perfectly apt. Hence the inhibition.

It's a separate question whether the idea expressed in the aphorism I'm looking for is actually true. I did find this old Metafilter question, asked by a woman who worried her husband's little lies. She expressed certainty that he wasn't lying about anything big (like infidelity), but she was catching many little lies, such as the fact that he'd said he'd carry a bag lunch to work, when in fact he ate at a restaurant. She also worried about her own worrying, since her husband was "a wonderful, patient, generous guy who treats me well and loves me more than anything," and she didn't want to be like the "extremely controlling parent" he grew up with and who probably caused him to develop a habit of telling little lies.

I thought of another aphorism in the vicinity of what I'm searching for: "Don't sweat the small stuff." Do little things not matter? Or can we tell something important about a person by the way they handle the details?

"God is in the details"... right? Or is it "The Devil is in the details"? Maybe if I knew which of those 2 expressions is the right one, I'd know the answer to the question whether the idea expressed in the searched-for little-lies aphorism is true. Interestingly, both "God is in the details" and "The Devil is in the details" have their own Wikipedia page.

According to the "God" page, "God is in the details" (or "detail") seems to date back to Gustave Flaubert (written in French), and the Devil version is a variant. Satisfyingly, the "Devil" page backs up the theory that God came first.

Google's n-gram function reveals that the phrase "the devil is in the details" does not appear in print before ca. 1975.

Flaubert died in 1880, and it's quite clear that "God is in the detail" was often attributed to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who died in 1969. Perhaps it was around 1975 that we began to lose our veneration for detail, the sense that the little things mattered. Now, to fret over details is prissy and fussy. You're a stickler. A controlling parent. A person who sweats the small stuff is... sweaty.

There's this, which I quoted the other day:

Wittgenstein once said that the following bit of verse by Longfellow could serve him as a motto:

In the elder days of art
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part,
For the Gods are everywhere.

The quote is from that book "On Bullshit," which I've been reading and which actually isn't the origin of this morning's search for an aphorism. The origin of that is a discussion we had yesterday about someone — nobody you know.

IN THE COMMENTS: JackOfVA and Kit Carson come up with what I'm sure I was trying to think of:  "Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus" ("False in one thing, false in everything").

"I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called."

Wrote Fania Pascal, back in the 1930:

I croaked: “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.” He was disgusted: “You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like.”

That's quoted in Harry G. Frankfurt's book "On Bullshit." Frankfurt aptly wonders if that really happened like that:

It seems extraordinary, almost unbelievable, that anyone could object seriously to what Pascal reports herself as having said. That characterization of her feelings — so innocently close to the utterly commonplace “sick as a dog” — is simply not provocative enough to arouse any response as lively or intense as disgust. If Pascal’s simile is offensive, then what figurative or allusive uses of language would not be?

So perhaps it did not really happen quite as Pascal says. Perhaps Wittgenstein was trying to make a small joke, and it misfired. He was only pretending to bawl Pascal out, just for the fun of a little hyperbole; and she got the tone and the intention wrong. She thought he was disgusted by her remark, when in fact he was only trying to cheer her up with some playfully exaggerated mock criticism or joshing. In that case the incident is not incredible or bizarre after all. 

Pascal needs to be more appreciative of having a friend like Wittgenstein. I'd say. But Frankfurt credits her with having this friendship and therefore with an aptitude for discerning whether Wittgenstein is cranky or nice. He decides to take her report as "sufficiently true to her idea of Wittgenstein to have made sense to her" and to "accept Pascal’s report at face value, supposing that when it came to the use of allusive or figurative language, Wittgenstein was indeed as preposterous as she makes him out to be." That is, Pascal — who might lack a sense of humor — now gets credit for having portrayed Wittgenstein as ridiculous, as if she'd made a joke rather than not getting the joke.

But Frankfurt's agenda is talking about bullshit, not analyzing the quality of a joke. She was bullshitting about how she felt by carelessly likening it to something overly specific — how a run-over dog feels. So Wittgenstein was essentially saying: That's bullshit. The key point — for "On Bullshit" purposes — is that Pascal doesn't care about the truth with respect to how the dog feels. So then Wittgenstein could be disgusted because of the way she didn't care about how the dog felt.

But it's not as though there were any real dog that had been run over. Pascal wasn't being callous toward an actual suffering being. The suffering being was Pascal, and the callousness, if any, was Wittgenstein's. On this theory, which hurt Pascal's feelings, he was saying, essentially, let's not talk about your mundane little tonsil surgery and its predictable after-effects. Let's talk about something philosophical, and the first thing that springs to mind is that dog you just mentioned. And he introduces the new topic. Ironically, the distraction into the random issue of animal feelings was much more likely to alleviate Pascal's pain that going on about the details of the surgery.

In Frankfurt's view — the context of bullshit — Wittgenstein is disgusted by bullshit, the laxity about what is true. I sidetracked the discussion into the question of concern about suffering. But the original topic — and the theme of the day here on the blog — is joking.

Joking has a lax connection to truth and to suffering.