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Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
Sep 10, 2025
The wisdom of nations lies in their proverbs, which are brief and pithy.
No weapons are more potent than brevity and simplicity.
Be sincere; be brief; be seated.
Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it?
Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.
Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination.
it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.
Good things, when short, are twice as good.
If it takes a lot of words to say what you have in mind, give it more thought.
There's a great power in words, if you don't hitch too many of them together.
Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
Aiming at brevity, I become obscure.
Brevity in writing is the best insurance for its perusal.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
The more you say, the less people remember.
I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if an hour, I am ready now.
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.
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.
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.
Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.
it is the brevity of life which makes it tolerable; its experiences have value because they have an end.
Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.
Let those who thoughtfully consider the brevity of life remember the length of eternity.
The greatest surprise in life to me is the brevity of life.
Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator.
Even in our best shape we are a brittle piece of mortality. Your life is a breath, don't waste it.
We must be brief when traitors brave the field.
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.
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.
Every epigram should resemble a bee; it should have sting, honey, and brevity.
What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul.
I love story-writing because I can (more or less, on occasion) actually DO it. That's really the truth. I like the idea that a story is sort of a site for making cool language effects - a site for celebrating language, and, therefore, the world. And the brevity is part of the challenge. I like stories because I get them - I know how to make beauty, or something like beauty, in that mode.
If human lives be, for their very brevity, sweet, then beast lives are sweeter still...
Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.
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.
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?
[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.
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.
Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order; in fact, they are models of the way in which a musical idea can be expressed with utmost perfection in terms of brevity of form and simplicity of means.
It is not a great Xerxes army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand that march safely down to posterity.
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.
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.
As you know, shibumi has to do with great refinement underlying commonplace appearances. It is a statement so correct that it does not have to be bold, so poignant it does not have to be pretty, so true it does not have to be real. Shibumi is understanding, rather than knowledge. Eloquent silence. In demeanor, it is modesty without pudency. In art, where the spirit of shibumi takes the form of sabi, it is elegant simplicity, articulate brevity. In philosophy, where shibumi emerges as wabi, it is spiritual tranquility that is not passive; it is being without the angst of becoming.
Conversation! Supple sentences, with first and second meanings and overtones beyond, outrageous challenges with cleverly planned slip-points, rebuttals of elegant brevity; deceptions and guiles, patient explanations of the obvious, fleeting allusions to the unthinkable. As a preliminary, the conversationalist must gauge the mood, the intelligence and the verbal facility of the company. To this end, a few words of pedantic exposition often prove invaluable.
Teach him a certain refinement in sorting out and selecting his arguments, with an affection for relevance and so for brevity. Above all let him be taught to throw down his arms and surrender to truth as soon as he perceives it, whether the truth is born at his rival's doing or within himself from some change in his ideas.
I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
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.