Top 66 Brevity Is Quotes
#2. Brevity never fatigues; therefore, brevity is always a welcome guest.
Theophile Gautier
#3. Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#5. I often find that when a ruthless editor forces me to trim an article to fit into a certain number of column-inches, the quality of my prose improves as if by magic. Brevity is the soul of wit, and of many other virtues in writing.
Steven Pinker
#6. 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
#7. The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.
Russell Baker
#8. If brevity is the soul of wit then brevity and levity are the whole of it.
Michael R. Burch
#9. One false word, one extra word, and somebody's thinking about how they have to buy paper towels at the store. Brevity is very important. If you're going to be longwinded, it should be for a purpose. Not just because you like your words.
Patricia Marx
#13. When a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter. Thus, brevity is a by-product of vigor.
William Strunk Jr.
#14. But I hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified at once to those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.
George Eliot
#15. Brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
William Shakespeare
#16. My liege, and madam, to expostulate What majesty should be, what duty is, Why day is day, night night, and time is time, Were nothing but to waste night, day and time. Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief.
William Shakespeare
#17. I know you're scared, but doing something even though it scares you is the definition of brave.
Sarah Morgan
#18. 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 ...
#19. 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
#20. The single most frustrating and saddening aspect of human life is its shocking brevity.
Sean DeLauder
#21. 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
#22. The Bible has much to say about the brevity of life and the necessity of preparing for eternity. I am convinced that only when a man is prepared to die is he also prepared to live.
Billy Graham
#23. The story of a life can be as long or as short as the teller wishes. Whether the life is tragic or enlightened, the classic gravestone inscription marking simply the dates of birth and death has, in its brevity, much to recommend it.
Michel Houellebecq
#24. Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination.
Louise Brooks
#25. A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.
George Saunders
#26. Storytelling is shaped by two contrary, yet complementary, impulses - one toward brevity, compactness, artful omission; the other toward expansion, amplification, enrichment.
Joyce Carol Oates
#30. The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending; and to have the two as close together as possible.
George Burns
#31. It is the brevity of life which makes it tolerable; its experiences have value because they have an end.
Winifred Holtby
#32. True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#33. 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
#36. Youth, balancing itself upon hope, is forever in extremes: its expectations are continually aroused only to be baffled, and disappointment, like a summer shower, is violent in proportion to its brevity.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
#37. This is a brief life, but in its brevity it offers us some splendid moments, some meaningful adventures.
Rudyard Kipling
#39. This is not about the mere extension of life along a horizontal plane, but about the deepening of life along a vertical plane. Mere longevity cannot render life meaningful any more than brevity has the power to make it meaningless.
Peter Rollins
#40. 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
#41. I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
Mohsin Hamid
#42. 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
#43. It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#44. This is going to take a while. I'm a fantasy author. We have trouble with the concept of brevity.
Brandon Sanderson
#45. The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism - an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.
Kathryn Schulz
#46. We have deemed all these words necessary in order to explain that we have been traveling more slowly than was predicted, concision is not a definitive virtue, on occasion one loses out by talking too much, it is true, but how much has also been gained by saying more than was strictly necessary.
Jose Saramago
#47. From her character in the HBO miniseries: The art of politics is the art of applying the seat of the britches to the seat of the chair.
Abigail Adams
#48. Infancy is what is eternal, and the rest, all the rest, is brevity, extreme brevity.
Antonio Porchia
#49. The brevity of mini (psycho)therapies is another efficient forestaller of healing. The neocortex rapidly master didactic information, but the limbic brain takes mountains of repetition. No one expects to play the flute in six lessons or to become fluent in Italian in ten. (189)
Thomas Lewis
#50. 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 Conrad Rontgen
#51. The greatest surprise in life to me is the brevity of life.
Billy Graham
#52. 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
#53. What is the real function, the essential function, the supreme function, of language? Isn't it merely to convey ideas and emotions? Certainly. Then if we can do it with words of fonetic brevity and compactness, why keep the present cumbersome forms?
Mark Twain
#54. Life is too short to waste being a productive member of society.
Sol Luckman
#55. 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
#56. Characteristic of such affective equivalents is their brevity - manic-depressive cycles, as generally understood, occupy several weeks, and frequently longer. Monthly
Oliver Sacks
#57. The theatre can teach us some truth, but it is the truth of the illusory nature of our existence. It can alert us to the dream-like quality of our lives, their brevity, mutability and lack of solid grounds. As such, by reminding us of our mortality, it can foster in us the virtue of humility.
Terry Eagleton
#58. 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
#59. There is need of brevity, that the thought may run on.
Horace
#60. Personally, I am always more impressed by simplicity, clarity; it is the mark of a writer who knows his subject well and is secure enough not to 'lay it on' in the telling. Aim for complexity of thought, not expression.
Noah Lukeman
#63. I am, sir. It is my way - it always was my way, by instinct - ever to meet the brief with brevity, the direct with plainness.
Charlotte Bronte
#64. Brevity in writing is the best insurance for its perusal.
Rudolf Virchow
#66. Brevity in writing is
what charity is to all other virtues - righteousness is nothing
without the one,
nor authorship without the other.
Sydney Smith
