Brevity Quotes - Page 4

• Brevity may be the soul of wit, but not when someone's saying "I love you.

  Judith Viorst

  Love You, Soul, May

  Judith Viorst (1987). “Love and Guilt and the Meaning of Life, Etc.”, Fireside

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• For effective communication, use brevity. Jesus said, 'Follow me.' Now that's brief! He could be brief because of all that he was that he didn't have to say.

  Jim Rohn

  Jesus, Communication, Simplicity

  FaceBook post by Jim Rohn from Mar 17, 2015

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• I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity.

  Barack Obama

  Appreciation, Book, Cutting

  Barack Obama (2007). “Dreams From My Father”, p.9, Canongate Books

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• The little things are what is eternal, and the rest, all the rest, is brevity, extreme brevity.

  Antonio Porchia

  Infancy Is, Extremes, Eternal

  "Voces". Book by Antonio Porchia, 1943.

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• Love all. Trust a few. Do wrong to none. This above all: to thine own self be true. No legacy is so rich as honesty. Brevity is the soul of wit

  William Shakespeare

  Honesty, Self, Soul

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• Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.

  Maxine Hong Kingston

  Years, Twelve, Want

  Maxine Hong Kingston (2009). “To Be the Poet”, p.3, Harvard University Press

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• Brevity is the soul of command. Too much talking suggests desperation on the part of the leader. Speak shortly, decisively and to the point–and couch your desires in such natural logic that no one can raise objections. Then move on.

  Cyrus the Great

  Moving, Talking, Leader

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• Filter your pain through the brevity of this life and the unending beauty of the next.

  Max Lucado

  Pain, Filters, Next

  Twitter post from Nov 21, 2010

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• Why the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through

  Mohsin Hamid

  Book, People, Half

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• When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

  Hermann Hesse

  Home, Tree, Joy

  Hermann Hesse (1980). “Six Novels: With Other Stories and Essays”

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• [Six principles that make for a good story:] 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype; 6. compassion.

  Anton Chekhov

  Compassion, Objectivity, Political

  "Love in the Time of Numbness; or, Doctor Chekhov, Writer" by Siddhartha Mukherjee, www.newyorker.com. April 11, 2017.

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• It is such a great fault to talk too much that, in business and conversation, if what is good is also brief, it is doubly good, and one gains by brevity what one often loses by an excess of words.

  Madeleine de Souvre, marquise de Sable

  Business, Excess, Too Much

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• Breath and brevity are sisters; the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  Long, Enemy, Heartbeat

  "Walking with Her Muse: An Interview with Shirley Geok-lin Lim". Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1 July 2014, Pages 123 - 135, academic.oup.com. June 22, 2013.

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• There is need of brevity, that the thought may run on.

  Horace

  Running, Needs, May

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• You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood.

  Hector Hugh Munro

  Soul, Widowhood, Feels

  "The Chronicles of Clovis". Book by Saki (Hector Hugh Munro). Chapter: "The Match Maker", 1911.

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• We think that play and fairytales belong to childhood - how shortsighted that is! As though we would want at any time in our life to live without play and fairytales! We give these things other names, to be sure, and feel differently about them, but precisely this is the evidence that they are the same things, for the child too regards play as his work and fairy tales as his truth. The brevity of life ought to preserve us from a pedantic division of life into different stages - as though each brought something new.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Children, Thinking, Play

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• "What is the greatest surprise you have found about life?" a university student asked me several years ago. "The brevity of it," I replied without hesitation. Time moves so quickly, and no matter who we are or what we have done, the time will come when our lives will be over. As Jesus said, "As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work" (John 9:4).

  Billy Graham

  Jesus, Moving, Night

  "Just As I Am : The Autobiography of Billy Graham". Book by Billy Graham co-written with Cliff Barrows, 1997.

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• The art of reasoning becomes of first importance. In this line antiquity has left us the finest models for imitation; I should consider the speeches of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, as pre-eminent specimens of logic, taste, and that sententious brevity which, using not a word to spare, leaves not a moment for inattention to the hearer. Amplification is the vice of modern oratory.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Art, Taste, Firsts

  "The Writings of Thomas Jefferson". Book by Thomas Jefferson, p. 30, 1904.

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• Jesus! it is the name which moves the harps of heaven to melody. Jesus! the life of all our joys. If there be one name more charming, more precious than another, it is this name. It is woven into the very warp and woof of our psalmody. Many of our hymns begin with it, and scarcely any, that are good for anything, end without it. It is the sum total of all delights. It is the music with which the bells of heaven ring; a song in a word; an ocean for comprehension, although a drop for brevity; a matchless oratorio in two syllables; a gathering up of the hallelujahs of eternity in five letters.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Song, Jesus, Ocean

  Charles Spurgeon (2016). “Morning and Evening”, p.158, Discovery House

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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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• 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.

  Bertrand Russell

  Mind, World, Realizing

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

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• The word itself has another color. It’s not a word with any resonance, although the e was once pronounced. There is only the bump now between b and l, the relief at the end, the whew. It hasn’t the sly turn which crimson takes halfway through, yellow’s deceptive jelly, or the rolled-down sound in brown. It hasn’t violet’s rapid sexual shudder or like a rough road the irregularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pancake covered in cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the assertive brevity of red, the whine of green.

  William H. Gass

  Yellow, Color, Green

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• 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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• 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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• Let those who thoughtfully consider the brevity of life remember the length of eternity.

  Thomas Ken

  Life, Remember, Eternity

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