Brevity Quotes - Page 5

• I have a talent for silence and brevity. I can keep silent when it seems best to do so, and when I speak I can, and do usually, quit when I am done. This talent, or these two talents, I have cultivated. Silence and concise, brief speaking have got me some laurels, and, I suspect, lost me some. No odds. Do what is natural to you, and you are sure to get all the recognition you are entitled to.

  Rutherford B. Hayes

  Odds, Two, Silence

  Diary entry. "Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes: Nineteenth President of the United States". Book edited by Charles Richard Williams, The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, November 20, 1872.

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• With vivid words your just conceptions grace,
  Much truth compressing in a narrow space;
  Then many shall peruse, but few complain,
  And envy frown, and critics snarl in vain.

  John Wolcot

  Space, Envy, Grace

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• Every epigram should resemble a bee; it should have sting, honey, and brevity.

  Martial

  Should Have, Honey, Bees

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• If, in the very intense electric field in the neighbourhood of the cathode, the molecules of the gas are dissociated and are split up, not into the ordinary chemical atoms, but into these primordial atoms, which we shall for brevity call corpuscles; and if these corpuscles are charged with electricity and projected from the cathode by the electric field, they would behave exactly like the cathode rays.

  Joseph John Thomson

  Rays, Ordinary, Molecules

  "Cathode rays". Philosophical Magazine, (44, 293), 1897.

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• Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy.

  Ali Smith

  Joy, Insightful, Stories

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• If human lives be,
  for their very brevity, sweet,
  then beast lives are sweeter still...

  Isobelle Carmody

  Sweet, Life Is, Beast

  Isobelle Carmody (2007). “Winter Door: The Gateway Trilogy Book Two”, p.9, Random House Books for Young Readers

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• Children should not be coddled in their intellectual training any more than in their physical; and though the studies should be made interesting the interest should arise out of the studies themselves. We have bred a generation that cannot digest anything intellectual but tablets of peptonized food. One sees that in the popular papers with their brevity, still increasing in brevity as far as brevity can increase, and in the capacity for thought of our rulers.

  Arthur Lynch

  Education, Children, Interesting

  Arthur Lynch (1921). “Moods of Life: Popular Psychological Studies of Affairs of Every Day”

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• When we look to presumed sources of origin for competing evolutionary explanations of the giraffe's long neck, we find either nothing at all, or only the shortest of speculative conjectures. Length, of course, need not correspond with importance. Garrulous old Polonius , in a rare moment of clarity, reminded us that "brevity is the soul of wit" (and then immediately vitiated his wise observation with a flood of woolly words about Hamlet 's Madness.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Wise, Long, Soul

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• I yearn to live and love and burn, and yet so much of my time is spent faking and forgetting, faking and forgetting I carry out my disbelief with uninspired hands, my eyes shut, my emotions dulled, my spirit numb. In times like these I am in desperate need of truth to come to me like a blinding light, like a splinter in my soul, reminding me of the brevity of my time here on earth.

  Jon Foreman

  Eye, Light, Times Like These

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• The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity - but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Past, Today, Description

  Yevgeny Zamyatin (2010). “We: Introduction by Will Self”, p.16, Random House

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• I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Book, Writing, Years

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• Brevity: To say at once whatever is to be said.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Said

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• Favorite books and authors while growing up - I'd need a book to list them all. For the sake of brevity: Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, Victor Hugo, world's mythology, the Arthurian legends. And the unabridged dictionary. And they're still my favorites. They get better each time I read them.

  Lloyd Alexander

  Growing Up, Book, Get Better

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• The land is not old. It only changes, becoming one thing and the next. We are the ones who ascribe age, the brevity of our lives demanding a beginning, middle and end.

  Craig Childs

  Becoming One, Land, Age

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• Usually at the end of each story we're thrown clear out of the story's world and then we're given a new world to enter. What's unique about a linked collection is that it can deliver both sets of narrative pleasures - the novel's long immersion into character-world and the story anthology's energetic (and mortal) brevity - the linked collection is unique in its ability to be both abrupt and longitudinal simultaneously.

  Junot Diaz

  Character, Unique, Long

  Interview with Gina Frangello, therumpus.net. September 30, 2012.

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• A form wherein we can enjoy simultaneously what is best in both the novel and the short story form. My plan was to create a book that affords readers some of the novel's long-form pleasures but that also contains the short story's ability to capture what is so difficult about being human - the brevity of our moments, their cruel irrevocability.

  Junot Diaz

  Book, Long, Stories

  Interview with Gina Frangello, therumpus.net. September 30, 2012.

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• If brevity is the soul of wit then brevity and levity are the whole of it.

  Michael R. Burch

  Soul, Levity, Wit

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• ... if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being perserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offsping similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection.

  Charles Darwin

  Strong, Struggle, Principles

  Charles Darwin, Paul H. Barrett (1987). “The Works of Charles Darwin: On the origin of species 1959”

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• That a thing made by hand, the work and thought of a single craftsman, can endure much longer than its maker, through centuries in fact, can survive natural catastrophe, neglect, and even mistreatment, has always filled me with wonder. Sometimes in museums, looking at a humble piece of pottery from ancient Persia or Pompeii, or a finely wrought page from a medieval illuminated manuscript toiled over by a nameless monk, or a primitive tool with a carved handle, I am moved to tears. The unknown life of the maker is evanescent in its brevity, but the work of his or her hands and heart remains.

  Susan Vreeland

  Heart, Humble, Hands

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• A great many people who spend their time mourning over the brevity of life could make it seem longer if they did a little more work.

  Don Marquis

  Work, People, Mourning

  Don Marquis (1935). “Archy does his part”

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• Good similes depend upon close observation. They depend upon brevity and wit....They have to fit in context.

  James J. Kilpatrick

  Fit, Wit, Simile

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• This is going to take a while. I'm a fantasy author. We have trouble with the concept of brevity.

  Brandon Sanderson

  Fantasy, Trouble, Concepts

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• The public, as a whole, finds reassurance in longevity, and, after the necessary interlude of reaction, is disposed to recognize extreme old age as a sign of excellence. The long-liver has triumphed over at least one of man's initial handicaps: the brevity of life.

  Vita Sackville-West

  Men, Long, Excellence

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• He who writes distichs, wishes, I suppose, to please by brevity. But, tell me, of what avail is their brevity, when there is a whose book full of them?

  Martial

  Book, Writing, Wish

  Martial (1871). “The Epigrams of Martial”, p.362

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• It is not merely the brevity by which the haiku isolates a particular group of phenomena from all the rest; nor its suggestiveness, through which it reveals a whole world of experience. It is not only in its remarkable use of the season word, by which it gives us a feeling of a quarter of the year; nor its faint all-pervading humour. Its peculiar quality is its self-effacing, self-annihilative nature, by which it enables us, more than any other form of literature, to grasp the thing-in-itself.

  Reginald Horace Blyth

  Art, Nature, Self

  Reginald Horace Blyth (1982). “Haiku: Haiku”

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