Brevity Quotes - Page 6

• I'm a Ford, not a Lincoln. My addresses will never be as eloquent as Mr. Lincoln's. But I will do my very best to equal his brevity and his plain speaking.

  Gerald R. Ford

  Addresses, Plain Speaking, Equal

  Gerald R. Ford's Address After Taking the Oath of Office as Vice President, www.nytimes.com. December 7, 1973.

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• Our senses will not admit anything extreme. Too much noise confuses us, too much light dazzles us, too great distance or nearness prevents vision, too great prolixity or brevity weakens an argument, too much pleasure gives pain, too much accordance annoys.

  Blaise Pascal

  Pain, Distance, Light

  Blaise Pascal (1849). “Thoughts of Blaise Pascal”, p.83

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• It was almost funny. Life seemed downright accidental in its brevity, and death a punch line to a lousy joke.

  Maureen Johnson

  Funny Life, Lines, Jokes

  Maureen Johnson (2011). “The Name of the Star”, p.139, Penguin

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• Conversation! Supple sentences, with first and second meanings and overtones beyond, outrageous challenges with cleverly planned slip-points, rebuttals of elegant brevity; deceptions and guiles, patient explanations of the obvious, fleeting allusions to the unthinkable. As a preliminary, the conversationalist must gauge the mood, the intelligence and the verbal facility of the company. To this end, a few words of pedantic exposition often prove invaluable.

  Jack Vance

  Challenges, Deception, Fleeting

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• My biggest poetic influences are probably 20th-century British and Irish poets. So I suppose I'm always listening for the music I associate with that poetry, the telling images, the brevity. I want to hear it in my own work as well as in the poetry I read. However, I think I'm generally more forgiving of other poets than myself.

  David Starkey

  Thinking, Forgiving, Listening

  Source: andreaauten.wordpress.com

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• The brevity of human life gives a melancholy to the profession of the architect.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Giving, Architecture, Melancholy

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1973). “Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks: 1847-1848”, p.382, Harvard University Press

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• Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order; in fact, they are models of the way in which a musical idea can be expressed with utmost perfection in terms of brevity of form and simplicity of means.

  Bela Bartok

  Mean, Order, Ideas

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• It's no use telling us that something was 'mysterious' or 'loathsome' or 'awe-inspiring' or 'voluptuous.' By direct description, by metaphor and simile, by secretly evoking powerful associations, by offering the right stimuli to our nerves (in the right degree and the right order), and by the very beat and vowel-melody and length and brevity of your sentences, you must bring it about that we, we readers, not you, exclaim, 'how mysterious!' or 'loathsome' or whatever it is. Let me taste for myself, and you'll have no need to tell me how I should react.

  C. S. Lewis

  Powerful, Offering, Order

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• Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.

  Walter Pater

  Attitude, Sleep, Effort

  Walter Pater (2013). “The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry”, p.154, Courier Corporation

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• I love story-writing because I can (more or less, on occasion) actually DO it. That's really the truth. I like the idea that a story is sort of a site for making cool language effects - a site for celebrating language, and, therefore, the world. And the brevity is part of the challenge. I like stories because I get them - I know how to make beauty, or something like beauty, in that mode.

  George Saunders

  Writing, Ideas, Challenges

  Source: und.edu

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• When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the facts that all men and women are approaching an inevitable doom: the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other. This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier as we journey on. It should bring a closer kinship, a better understanding, and a deeper sympathy for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death.

  Clarence Darrow

  Pain, Journey, Men

  Clarence Darrow (1995). “Why I Am an Agnostic and Other Essays”

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• The greatest surprise in life to me is the brevity of life.

  Billy Graham

  Surprise, Surprise In Life, Brevity Of Life

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• Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Long, Immature, Novices

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• If the hand be held between the discharge-tube and the screen, the darker shadow of the bones is seen within the slightly dark shadow-image of the hand itself... For brevity's sake I shall use the expression 'rays'; and to distinguish them from others of this name I shall call them 'X-rays'.

  Wilhelm Rontgen

  Dark, Science, Expression

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• Necessary, since every moment in our lives is marked by death, like a shadow from another realm, it appear to us like a vanishing point for everything. How can one meditate on live without meditating too on its brevity, its precariousness, its fragility?

  Andre Comte-Sponville

  Shadow, Fragility, Vanishing

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• He will see himself and life and the world as truly as our human limitations will permit; realizing the brevity and minuteness of human life, he will realize also that in individual minds is concentrated whatever of value the known universe contains. And he will see that the man whose mind mirrors the world becomes in a sense as great as the world. In emancipation from the fears that beset the slave of circumstance he will experience a profound joy, and through all the vicissitudes of his outward life he will remain in the depths of his being a happy man.

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Mirrors, Profound

  Bertrand Russell (2015). “The Conquest of Happiness”, p.133, Lulu Press, Inc

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• As you know, shibumi has to do with great refinement underlying commonplace appearances. It is a statement so correct that it does not have to be bold, so poignant it does not have to be pretty, so true it does not have to be real. Shibumi is understanding, rather than knowledge. Eloquent silence. In demeanor, it is modesty without pudency. In art, where the spirit of shibumi takes the form of sabi, it is elegant simplicity, articulate brevity. In philosophy, where shibumi emerges as wabi, it is spiritual tranquility that is not passive; it is being without the angst of becoming.

  Trevanian

  Spiritual, Art, Real

  Trevanian (2005). “Shibumi: A Novel”, p.77, Broadway Books

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• Many things prevent knowledge, including the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life

  Protagoras

  Obscurity, Human Life, Humans

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• My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.

  William Zinsser

  Writing, Simplicity, Humanity

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• Much of the magical effect that poetry gives of rendering everything it touches pellucid comes from the necessity of compression that it imposes. The impossibility of pausing in poetry as long as may be needed to make sense clear causes many a set of words actually deficient in linguistic workmanship to pass for an eloquent brevity.

  Laura Riding

  Long, Giving, May

  "The Promise of Words". London Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 17, p. 23, September 07, 1995.

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• ...when a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter. Thus, brevity is a by-product of vigor.

  William Strunk, Jr.

  Stronger, Vigor, Made

  William Strunk Jr., E.B. White (1962). “the Elements of Style”

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• The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.

  Iris Murdoch

  Magic, Theatre, Wonderful

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• Teach him a certain refinement in sorting out and selecting his arguments, with an affection for relevance and so for brevity. Above all let him be taught to throw down his arms and surrender to truth as soon as he perceives it, whether the truth is born at his rival's doing or within himself from some change in his ideas.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Educational, Ideas, Words Of Wisdom

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• A good short story is a work of art which daunts us in proportion to its brevity.... No inspiration is too noble for it; no amountof hard work is too severe for it.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Art, Inspiration, Hard Work

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• Brevity never fatigues; therefore, brevity is always a welcome guest.

  Theophile Gautier

  Guests, Welcome, Fatigue

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