Quotes About Conciseness

#1. Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#2. Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity

Vladimir Nabokov

#3. The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that; and maybe sleeping beauty's dead.

Anne Rice

#4. Conciseness in art is essential and a refinement. The concise man makes one think; the verbose bores. Always work towards conciseness.

Edouard Manet

#5. Conciseness is underrated

Sarah Dessen

#6. Every man should study conciseness in speaking; it is a sign of ignorance not to know that long speeches, though they may please the speaker, are the torture of the hearer.

Owen Feltham

#7. Each sentence should have proper meaning, details should not be needlessly repeated, and every sentence should add to the entertainment value in one way or another.

A.J. Flowers

#8. What if capitalism is unsustainable, and socialism is impossible?

Ken MacLeod

#9. Nicely put," I said. "And all in less than two minutes."
"Conciseness is underrated," she said easily.

Sarah Dessen

#10. The longer we listen to one another - with real attention - the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.

Barbara Deming

#11. I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
(Letter 16, 1657)

Blaise Pascal

#12. Nothing is more certain than much of the force; as well as grace, of arguments or instructions depends their conciseness.

Alexander Pope

#13. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
[Letter to Harrison Blake; November 16, 1857]

Henry David Thoreau

#14. In doing the screenplay for 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' the most important thing for me was to constantly go back to wherever the opposition would argue. So I had to keep reading all the books and articles about why McCarthy is such a good guy.

George Clooney

#15. When you're fat and comfortable, your music is going to sound fat and comfortable.

Peter Hook

#16. My great-grandfather Melvin had been a carpenter - so was my father - and they taught me the value of tools: saws, hammers, chisels, files and rulers. It all dealt with conciseness and precision. It eliminated guesswork. One has to know his tools, so he doesn't work against himself.

Yusef Komunyakaa

#17. In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.
(On the Bravery of the English Common Soldiers)

Samuel Johnson

#18. Consciousness is the screen. The images on the screen are your perceptions, the illusion that life is solid, that there is a material universe.

Frederick Lenz

#19. The idea that somewhere in the desert far away you have a CO2 absorber that's removing the CO2 from the air is an attractive one. It's a costly process that many will say is too expensive, but so are fuel cells in cars. It's a matter of political will to move this forward.

Klaus Lackner

#20. Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

Hosea Ballou

#21. The human face is, after all, nothing more nor less than a mask.

Agatha Christie