Brevity Quotes

Brevity is the soul of lingerie. (Dorothy Parker)
Brevity is the sister of talent. View quote
Anton Chekhov
Brevity is the soul of wit. View quote
William Shakespeare
What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do. View quote
Arthur Schopenhauer
Infancy is what is eternal, and the rest, all the rest, is brevity, extreme brevity. View quote
Antonio Porchia
Much wisdom often goes with brevity of speech. View quote
Sophocles
As touching the gods, I do not know whether they exist or not, nor how they are featured; for there is much to prevent our knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life. View quote
Protagoras
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.) View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood. View quote
Saki
Much of the magical effect that poetry gives of rendering everything it touches pellucid comes from the necessity of compression that it imposes. The impossibility of pausing in poetry as long as may be needed to make sense clear causes many a set of words actually deficient in linguistic workmanship to pass for an eloquent brevity. (Laura Riding)
If, in the very intense electric field in the neighbourhood of the cathode, the molecules of the gas are dissociated and are split up, not into the ordinary chemical atoms, but into these primordial atoms, which we shall for brevity call corpuscles; and if these corpuscles are charged with electricity and projected from the cathode by the electric field, they would behave exactly like the cathode rays. View quote
J. J. Thomson
The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality. View quote
Russell Baker
I am 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. View quote
Gerald Ford
It was almost funny. Life seemed downright accidental in its brevity, and death a punch line to a lousy joke. View quote
Maureen Johnson
I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story. View quote
Annie Proulx
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. View quote
Ali Smith
Brevity is a great charm of eloquence. View quote
Cicero
Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator. View quote
Cicero
I have endeavoured to steer a middle course between the general verbosity of our English statutes, and the extreme brevity of the French criminal code. ... In the bills I have the honour of submitting to the House, a middle course has been steered between the redundancy of our own legal enactments, and the conciseness of the French code. View quote
Robert Peel
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)
Compressing 13,000 years of history on all continents into a 400-page book works out to an average of about one page per continent per 150 years, making brevity and simplification inevitable. Yet the compression brings a compensating benefit: long-term comparisons of regions yield insights that cannot be won from short-term studies of single societies. View quote
Jared Diamond
This is a brief life, but in its brevity it offers us some splendid moments, some meaningful adventures. View quote
Rudyard Kipling
With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. View quote
Walter Pater
We find that the manager, particularly at senior levels, is overburdened with work. With the increasing complexity of modern organizations and their problems, he is destined to become more so. He is driven to brevity, fragmentation, and superficiality in his tasks, yet he cannot easily delegate them because of the nature of his information. And he can do little to increase his available time or significantly enhance his power to manage. Furthermore, he is driven to focus on that which is current and tangible in his work, even though the complex problems facing many organizations call for reflection and a far-sighted perspective. View quote
Henry Mintzberg