One of the new literary forms of our age is that bastard son of the La Rochefoucauldian aphorism, the ‘inspirational quote’. The kind of tea-towel philosophy that used to be restricted to tea towels is now everywhere: on T-shirts; plastered on to whiteboards in the foyers of Tube stations; scribbled on chalkboards outside coffee shops; and, especially, pasted on to jpegs that are then posted all over social networks, with a background of a blue sky, a sunset or a seascape, or a picture of Gandhi or Steve Jobs with a faraway look. In the end, we only regret the chances we didn’t take. If you’re brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello. Goals are just dreams with deadlines. Sometimes misattributed, often untrue and invariably banal, they are liked, favourited, shared and forgotten, the aphoristic equivalent of a sugar rush. As an urgent corrective, I suggest that we share some uninspirational quotes. Here is a modest start: