Brevity Quotes - Page 5

• 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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• Our senses perceive no extreme. Too much sound deafens us; too much light dazzles us; too great distance or proximity hinders ourview. Too great length and too great brevity of discourse tends to obscurity; too much truth is paralyzing.... In short, extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice. They escape us, or we them.

  Blaise Pascal

  Truth, Distance, Light

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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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• Great captains do never use long orations when it comes to the point of execution.

  Philip Sidney

  Long, Use, Captains

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

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Said

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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