Brevity Quotes - Page 3

• Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Jargon, Aim, Avoiding

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• In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.

  Sydney Smith

  Running, Writing, Ideas

  Sydney Smith, lady Saba (Smith) Holland Holland (1855). “A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith”, p.431

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• Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love.

  William Shakespeare

  Love, Boyfriend, Valentines Day

  'Hamlet' (1601) act 2, sc. 2, l. [115]

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• I will be brief. Your noble son is mad.

  William Shakespeare

  Son, Mad, Noble

  William Shakespeare (1833). “The plays and poems of William Shakspeare”, p.840

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• If you can't explain something in a few words, try fewer.

  Robert Breault

  Trying, Few Words, Fewer

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• All pleasantry should be short; and it might even be as well were the serious short also.

  Voltaire

  Might, Serious, Should

  Voltaire (1824). “A philosophical dictionary, from the Fr. [by J.G. Gurton].”, p.319

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• It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

  John Ruskin

  Art, Writing, Discipline

  "A Joy for Ever: And Its Price in the Market". Book by John Ruskin, note 6, 1857.

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• Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Inspirational, Time, Life Is Too Short

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• The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

  Blaise Pascal

  Long, Letters, Leisure

  Blaise Pascal (1850). “The Provincial Letters of Blaise Pascal”, p.339

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• What can the redwoods tell us about ourselves? Well, I think they can tell us something about human time. The flickering, transitory quality of human time and the brevity of human life - the necessity to love.

  Richard Preston

  Motivation, Inspiration, Thinking

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• Poetry is like a portrait of a moment or person, and the poem is almost like looking at a photograph; it slaps you in the face and kisses you at the same time. Nothing else does that, with that brevity. Songs try to do it, but that's three minutes. A poem, you read it and it kind of changes your life and you don't know how it happened and you can never forget it. It's like the best song lyric, the best line from a film-everything in the world that's short and great put together.

  Warsan Shire

  Song, Kissing, Trying

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• For the sake of brevity, we will always represent this number 2.718281828459... by the letter e.

  Leonhard Euler

  Numbers, Number 2, Letters

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• Even in our best shape we are a brittle piece of mortality. Your life is a breath, don't waste it.

  LeCrae

  Pieces, Shapes, Waste

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• Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.

  George Santayana

  Men, Long, Speech

  George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana”

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• The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situations. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help is, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

  Aldous Huxley

  Real, Memorable, Omission

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• A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

  William Strunk, Jr.

  Writing, Should Have, Drawing

  The Elements of Style ch. 2 (1918)

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• Be brief on the logic and reason portion of your presentation. There are probably about a thousand facts about an automobile, but you don't need them all to make a decision. About a half dozen will do.

  Jim Rohn

  Inspirational, Motivational, Entrepreneur

  FaceBook post by Jim Rohn from Oct 31, 2015

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• If you can't write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don't have a clear idea.

  David Belasco

  Writing, Ideas, Cards

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• It is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.

  Robert Southey

  Happiness, Teacher, Teaching

  "A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern" ed. by Tryon Edwards, F. B. Dickerson Company, (p. 52), 1908.

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• It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writing, Law, Addresses

  Ernest Hemingway, Carlos Baker (2003). “Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961”, p.594, Simon and Schuster

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• In the pleading of cases nothing pleases so much as brevity.

  Pliny the Younger

  Speech, Pleading, Cases

  "Epistles" by Pliny the Younger, Book I. 20,

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• What is the real function, the essential function, the supreme function, of language? Isn't it merely to convey ideas and emotions? Certainly. Then if we can do it with words of fonetic brevity and compactness, why keep the present cumbersome forms?

  Mark Twain

  Real, Ideas, Essentials

  Mark Twain (2013). “Autobiography of Mark Twain”, p.276, Univ of California Press

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• Realize that illness and other temporal setbacks often come to us from the hand of God our Lord, and are sent to help us know ourselves better, to free ourselves of the love of created things, and to reflect on the brevity of this life and, thus, to prepare ourselves for the life which is without end.

  Ignatius of Loyola

  Hands, Helping, Realizing

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• Brevity - the sister of talent.

  Anton Chekhov

  Talent, Human Nature

  Letter to Alexander Chekhov, 11 Apr. 1889

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• The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.

  Russell Baker

  Essence, Ideas, Quality

  Russell Baker (1991). “There's a Country in My Cellar”, Avon Books

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