Top 100 Be Brief Quotes
#1. There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet.
James Baldwin
#3. There should be exit interviews for dating. Just a brief evaluation of the highlights and challenges of the relationship, and maybe a few questions like "So what exactly was it that motivated you to dump me?
Devan Sipher
#4. In brief, without being mindful of death, whatever Dharma practices you take up will be merely superficial.
Milarepa
#5. Your perspective is vital to your happiness. Some, blind to the bountiful opportunities around them, live lives of sadness and despair with brief moments of joy. Be alive to the abundant potential that surrounds you so that you live a life of peace and happiness with periods of challenging growth.
Richard G. Scott
#6. Stories should be natural as apples, brief as lust, long as a thought.
Leonard Michaels
#7. When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's [children's] minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#8. Quidquid praecipies, esto brevis.
(Whatever advice you give, be brief.)
Horace
#9. unscathed. As a victim, you might be taken to the point of not wanting to live anymore due to the loss of the soul mate illusion. Just know this, if you were to die, the Narcissist may have a slight feeling sorrow for a brief moment (although highly doubtful), but the Narcissist simply
Steve Craig
#10. It's terrifying the way molecular biology has become more and more jargon ridden. But I strongly believe that my book can be read by the intelligent layman. I want everyone who bought a copy of 'A Brief History of Time' to buy a copy of 'Genome'.
Matt Ridley
#11. How much past there is in a life, however brief it be.
Madame De Stael
#12. As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief ... without moral purpose or human interest.
Archibald MacLeish
#13. The overall commentary on what I'm doing is saying, 'Hey look! I get to create whatever persona I want to, and it's all up to me. And the truth is, we are all - basically the universe - pretending to be humans for a brief moment of time. With a little self-induced amnesia.
RuPaul
#14. Happiness is fleeting and life is brief, but we know that, nonetheless, life can be savored and that happiness, even of the ecstatic kind, is available to us.
Christopher Hitchens
#15. The wisdom of nations lies in their proverbs, which are brief and pithy. Collect and learn them; they are notable measures of directions for human life; you have much in little; they save time in speaking; and upon occasion may be the fullest and safest answer.
William Penn
#16. have sufficiently urged that all suggestions as to financial innovation be regarded with extreme skepticism. Such seeming innovation is merely some variant on an old design, new only in the brief and defective memory of the financial world.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#18. At our age, surely there are better things to sustain us, to sustain a marriage, than the brief flame of passion?" ... "You are mistaken, Ernest," she said at last. "There is only the passionate spark. Without it, two people living together may be lonelier than if they lived quite alone.
Helen Simonson
#20. None of us knows how long he shall live or when his time will come. But soon, all that will be left of our brief lives is the pride our children feel when they speak our names.
Hiroyuki Sanada
#21. It is a kind of natural magic that enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a period, may happen to be their home.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#22. The Christian faith is meant to be lived moment by moment. It isn't some broad, general outline
it's a long walk with a real Person. Details count: passing thoughts, small sacrifices, a few encouraging words, little acts of kindness, brief victories over nagging sins.
Joni Eareckson Tada
#23. A few years hence and he will be beneath the sod; but those cliffs will stand, as now, facing the ocean, incessantly lashed by its waves, yet unshaken, immovable; and other eyes will gaze on them for their brief day of life, and then they, too, will close.
Henry Parry Liddon
#24. That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
George Santayana
#25. They'd made a pact to be friends forever, but forever could be so, so brief.
Nick Cutter
#26. Desription should be very brief and have an incidental nature.
Anton Chekhov
#27. Satisfaction, for us, is only a brief thing. The man who acquires wealth does not reach a point where he has enough. Success for us is more like acceleration than speed. Interest cannot be maintained at a constant level.
Neal Asher
#28. Theodora glared at me, but Mrs. Murphy Sallis gave me a brief smile and offered me her hand, which was as smooth and soft as old lettuce.
Lemony Snicket
#29. endured - how I endured! - for one day I knew her services would no longer be required and I would make my come-out and at least I would have a brief time when I could meet girls of my own age. But Miss Stamp was raised to the rank of companion and still had the schooling
Marion Chesney
#30. Go, write it in a martial hand; be curst and brief; it is no matter how witty, so it be eloquent and fun of invention: taunt him with the licence of ink: if thou thou'st him some thrice, it shall not be amiss; and as many lies as will lie in thy shee.
William Shakespeare
#31. Someday a loving Hand will be laid upon your shoulder and this brief message will be given: Come home.
Billy Graham
#32. Lifelong pain, an unwanted pregnancy, and even death may be the reward for such a brief window of pleasure. What a foolish gamble!
James C. Dobson
#33. Honorable Senators: My sincerest thanks I offer you. Conserve the firm foundations of our institutions. Do your work with the spirit of a soldier in the public service. Be loyal to the Commonwealth and to yourselves and be brief; above all be brief.
Calvin Coolidge
#34. But something cannot be made out of nothing. Dust rose in the air, caught the rays of the sun for a brief moment and sparkled, and then returned to the earth as mere dust.
David Klass
#35. Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief.
Werner Herzog
#36. Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved
William Shakespeare
#37. Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured in astronomical scale
Bertrand Russell
#38. We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief ... In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#39. Given the brief - and generally misleading - exposure most people have to mathematics at school, raising the public awareness of mathematics will always be an uphill battle.
Keith Devlin
#40. We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we've chosen to do with our life.
Steve Jobs
#42. There are simple rules of engagement: You need to have your voice, but it has to be very intentional - be brief and to the point, with fresh ideas. Don't restate things someone else has said. Make eye contact with the person who has the floor.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett
#43. You would be dressed in fine clothes and feast royally until your brief reign ended and they cut your heart out.
Peter Thiel
#44. You've gotta believe that the split second that changed your life - the brief moment that took your leg and bruised your melon - can't be the defining moment of your life. It was just an instant, a flash. Just one second out of millions of seconds. It doesn't get to own you.
Jennifer Handford
#45. Whatever advice you give, be brief.
Horace
#46. For me the motley and the bauble, yea,
Though all be vanity, as the Preacher saith,
The mirth of love be mine for one brief breath!
Frederic Lawrence Knowles
#47. For a brief second I remember everything about who and what I used to be. But most of all, I remember Harlin. And I wonder how he'll find me if I'm someone else.
Suzanne Young
#48. When you introduce a moral lesson, let it be brief.
Horace
#50. There is a Russian proverb,' Nepeja said. 'Beat your shuba, and it will be warmer; beat your wife and she shall be sweeter.'
There was a brief silence, while his hearers considered the analogy. 'Beat your brother and he shall be deader?' at length Danny said.
Dorothy Dunnett
#51. Giving a brief sermon, the Abbess once said, 'A hot furnace does not need to be heated. A loving heart does not need to be loved. Being loving is more important than being loved.
Gil Fronsdal
#52. If design is a problem-solving discipline, then great design must start with a thorough understanding of the problem to be solved - which is best found in a great design brief.
Peter L. Phillips
#53. Matthew had been accumulating secrets ... My life might be too brief to hear them all, never mind understand them.
Deborah Harkness
#54. It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.
Edgar Allan Poe
#55. Mr. Poe opened his mouth to say something, but erupted into a brief fit of coughing. "I have made arrangements," he said finally, "for you to be raised by a distant relative of yours who lives on the other side of town. His name is Count Olaf.
Lemony Snicket
#56. So that, logically, in the brief time allotted to us, we should be as kind to one another as is humanly possible and face the harsh facts of reality without fear or flinching.
Michael Swanwick
#57. And when darkness had left its mark on you, moments of brightness could be brief and short-lived.
Andrew Warren
#58. Tessa rolled over, burying her face in her pillow. For so many years she had wondered what her first kiss would be like-if he would be handsome, if he would love her, if he would be kind. She had never imagined that the kiss would be so brief and wild. Or that it would taste of holy water and blood.
Cassandra Clare
#59. They don't want to hear how Octavia is different from us. They want to know how we're the same. They know what it's like to have an itch. They can imagine what it's like to be a mother. This brief encounter has changed them. Now they can identify with an octopus. They
Sy Montgomery
#60. You will find joy, frustration and sorrow in your quest. Never forget that friendship and loyalty are more precious than riches ... Happiness can be brief, but it knows no time in the land of dreams.
Brian Jacques
#61. You seem to forget that the sun must set. You knew perfectly well that I would not be with you long enough. Still, you weep and cry and ask God 'Why' as if it were some kind of surprise. Why? Because love changes everything. Love's the surprise.
Kate McGahan
#62. However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or
complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't
this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will
never even be offered life in the first place?
Richard Dawkins
#63. I had never considered marriage, but I had an open mind, and I was to learn after a brief try at it that most open minds should be closed for repairs.
Wilson Mizner
#64. By what warrant, therefore, is such an attack to be termed an extended epilepsy rather than a quite brief and severe, let us say, a condensed migraine?
Oliver Sacks
#65. When we can be centered in ourselves, even for brief periods of time in the face of the pull of the outer world, not having to look elsewhere for something to fill us up or make us happy, we can be at home wherever we find ourselves, at peace with things as they are, moment by moment.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#66. They all deserve to die.
Even you, Mrs. Lovett
Even I.
Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief
For the rest of us death would be relief.
Stephen Sondheim
#67. Life is brief, even at its longest. Whatever you are going to do with your life, get at it. All good will be attacked. All values must be defended. In all areas of the human existence, what we put into this world, we get back from it.
Jim Rohn
#68. Things have to be done fast in America , and therefore therapy has to be brief.
Gregory Bateson
#70. Love is fleeting. It's a brief spark that flares in the heavens, bursting forth in a cascade of glory only to be snuffed out in the darkness of space. It is not something worth risking the cosmos over.
Colleen Houck
#71. The progressive historical role of capitalism may be summed up in two brief propositions: increase in the productive forces of social labour, and the socialisation of that labour. But both these facts manifest themselves in extremely diverse processes in different branches of the national economy.
Vladimir Lenin
#72. The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.
Albert Camus
#73. It was a night of impossible things, and he fought to stay awake, to be conscious and alert for as long as possible, to enjoy and repeat to himself everything that had happened to him, a lifetime's worth of wishes coming true in a few brief hours.
Hanya Yanagihara
#74. Use 'breath prayers' throughout the day, as many Christians have done for centuries. You choose a brief sentence or a simple phrase that can be repeated to Jesus in one breath.
Rick Warren
#75. It was a tiny moment, brief and fleeting, but Olanna noticed how scrupulously they avoided any contact, any touch of skin, as if they were united by a common knowledge so monumental that they were determined not to be united by anything else.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#76. Self-destruction would be a brief, almost autoerotic free-fall into a great velvet darkness.
Mark Mirabello
#77. Don't grow much more, or you will be taller than I am, little Longlegs! Annemarie smiled, but Peter's comment was no longer the lighthearted fun of the past. It was only a brief grasp at something that had gone.
Lois Lowry
#78. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution , where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment ... only to vanish forever.
Alan Watts
#79. Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It's not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother's old familiar grief. Somebody I love to tend my future grave. Probably this is the wrong thing to be wishing for.
Karen Russell
#80. All pain is either severe or slight, if slight, it is easily endured; if severe, it will without doubt be brief.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#81. Brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living,
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#82. Be brief, for no talk can please when too long. Being prepared is half the victory.
Miguel De Cervantes
#83. I know I'm not alone and I don't walk alone. That I won't. When the thin whisper of a veil between what I can't see and what I can is pulled back and for one brief second I get a glimpse of what will be. Where the words 'might' and 'hope' intersect.
Charles Martin
#86. When you become part of something, in some way you count. It could be a march; it could be a rally, even a brief one. You're part of something, and you suddenly realize you count. To count is very important.
Studs Terkel
#87. Anytime you open your mouth there's going to be someone who's put off. I try to deal with that by keeping the topical portions of my show brief. I realize that some people wish my comments were briefer.
John Hall
#88. If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives would be not only meager but in a youth-worshiping country like America painfully brief.
Gore Vidal
#89. Even a very brief tape-delay introduces a form of censorship into the broadcast - not direct governmental control, but it means that a network representative is in effect guessing at what a government might tolerate, which can be even worse.
Frank Pierson
#90. A brief note on the legend of Pandora's Box: Ever wondered why bundled in with all the torrents, and suffering of man kind the Gods put hope down there at the bottom, answer because in certain circumstances hope can be the worst torment of them all.
Tom Holt
#91. Wow. I'm impressed. Seriously." Ryan stared at him in amazement. "Wow." A brief moment passed and he shook his head slowly. "Some day I'll be able to think of something more clever than that to say, but at the moment I'm freakin' floored.
Santino Hassell
#92. We danced and laughed into the morning. But gradually we stopped. It was as if we all knew that we could be happy for only a brief moment.
Ishmael Beah
#93. He'd asked for his to be cooked medium rare, which in Mirkarvian cuisine meant it had been shown a picture of an oven for a moment and then served. A very brief moment, mind.
Jonathan L. Howard
#94. I shall be as brief as I can, for it is not by piling up detail that I hope to achieve my picture, but by putting the emphasis where I think it belongs.
Robertson Davies
#95. I used to enjoy using dots where they would be least expected, not at the end of a sentence but in the middle, creating the effect ... of a skipped beat. It seemed to me the mind reacted - first! ... in dots, dashes, and exclamation points, then rationalized, drew up a brief, with periods.
Tom Wolfe
#96. I shall be so brief that I have already finished
Salvador Dali
#97. As we meet and touch, each day, The many travelers on our way, Let every such brief contact be A glorious, helpful minister.
Sarah Chauncey Woolsey
#98. I would do anything I could to go back to that time when we could have been together and change the way I acted. I'd change it, because we were fated to be together however brief, however unbelievable, however painful, however flawed.- Jack Howard
K.A. Linde
#99. As you can experience, the request to retrieve and say aloud your phone number or your spouse's birthday also requires a brief but significant effort, because the entire string must be held in memory as a response is organized.
Daniel Kahneman
#100. But when He became incarnate, and was made man, He commenced afresh the long line of human beings, and furnished us, in a brief, comprehensive manner, with salvation; so that what we had lost in Adam - namely to be according to the image and likeness of God - that we might recover in Jesus Christ
Michelle A. Gonzalez
