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| C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917. |
| Brevity |
| Brevity is the soul of wit. Shakespeare. | 1 | ||||||||
| Concentration alone conquers. Charles Buxton. | 2 | ||||||||
| A downright fact may be briefly told. Ruskin. | 3 | ||||||||
| I will be brief. Shakespeare. | 4 | ||||||||
| A verse may find him whom a sermon flies. George Herbert. | 5 | ||||||||
| Brevity is a great praise of eloquence. Cicero. | 6 | ||||||||
| The one prudence in life is concentration. Emerson. | 7 | ||||||||
| Whatever precepts you give, be short. Horace. | 8 | ||||||||
| Aiming at brevity, I become obscure. Horace. | 9 | ||||||||
| The fewer words, the better prayer. Luther. | 10 | ||||||||
| A parsimony of words prodigal of sense. Disraeli. | 11 | ||||||||
| Brevity is the child of silence, and is a credit to its parentage. H. W. Shaw. | 12 | ||||||||
| Brevity never fatigues; therefore, brevity is always a welcome guest. Théophile Gautier. | 13 | ||||||||
| We must be brief when traitors brave the field. Shakespeare. | 14 | ||||||||
| Rather to excite your judgment briefly than to inform it tediously. Bacon. | 15 | ||||||||
| Great captains do never use long orations when it comes to the point of execution. Sir P. Sidney. | 16 | ||||||||
| Cervantes speaks of potted wisdom of “short sentences drawn long experience.” Charles Buxton. | 17 | ||||||||
| It is safe to make a choice of your thoughts, scarcely ever safe to express them all. Barrow. | 18 | ||||||||
| Brevity is very good, when we are, or are not, understood. Butler. | 19 | ||||||||
| You may get a large amount of truth into a brief space. Beecher. | 20 | ||||||||
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| The wisdom of nations lies in their proverbs, which are brief and pithy. William Penn. | 21 | ||||||||
Gay. | 22 | ||||||||
| The more you say, the less people remember. The fewer the words, the greater the profit. Fénelon. | 23 | ||||||||
| The more an idea is developed, the more concise becomes its expression; the more a tree is pruned, the better is the fruit. Alfred Bougeart. | 24 | ||||||||
| Generally, downright fact may be told in a plain way; and we want downright facts, at the present, more than anything else. Ruskin. | 25 | ||||||||
| If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams—the more they are condensed the deeper they burn. Southey. | 26 | ||||||||
| General observations drawn from particulars are the jewels of knowledge, comprehending great store in a little room. Locke. | 27 | ||||||||
| A little plot of ground thick sown is better than a great field which, for the most part of it, lies fallow. Bishop Norris. | 28 | ||||||||
| Brevity is the best recommendation of a speech, not only in the case of a senator, but in that, too, of an orator. Cicero. | 29 | ||||||||
| I saw one excellency was within my reach—it was brevity; and I determined to obtain it. Jay. | 30 | ||||||||
| Since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes—I will be brief. Shakespeare. | 31 | ||||||||
| Brevity and conciseness are the parents of conviction. The leaden bullet is more fatal than when multiplied into shot. Hosea Ballou. | 32 | ||||||||
| Brevity in writing is what charity is to all other virtues—righteousness is nothing without the one, nor authorship without the other. Sydney Smith. | 33 | ||||||||
| I would fain coin wisdom—mould it, I mean, into maxims, proverbs, sentences, that can easily be retained and transmitted. Joubert. | 34 | ||||||||
| When a man has no design but to speak plain truth, he may say a great deal in a very narrow compass. Steele. | 35 | ||||||||
| It is not a great Xerxes army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand that march safely down to posterity. Lowell. | 36 | ||||||||
| Brevity is the body and soul of wit. It is wit itself, for it alone isolates sufficiently for contrasts; because redundancy or diffuseness produces no distinctions. Jean Paul Richter. | 37 | ||||||||
Halleck. | 38 | ||||||||
| A sentence well couched takes both the sense and understanding. I love not those cart-rope speeches that are longer than the memory of man can fathom. Feltham. | 39 | ||||||||
| Was there ever anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe and the Pilgrim’s Progress? Dr. Johnson. | 40 | ||||||||
Pindar. | 41 | ||||||||
| The seven wise men of Greece, so famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired all that fame, each of them, by a single sentence consisting of two or three words. South. | 42 | ||||||||
| The Grecian’s maxim would indeed be a sweeping clause in literature; it would reduce many a giant to a pygmy, many a speech to a sentence, and many a folio to a primer. Colton. | 43 | ||||||||
| It is the work of fancy to enlarge, but of judgment to shorten and contract; and therefore this must be as far above the other as judgment is a greater and nobler faculty than fancy or imagination. South. | 44 | ||||||||
| Talk to the point, and stop when you have reached it. The faculty some possess of making one idea cover a quire of paper is not good for much. Be comprehensive in all you say or write. To fill a volume upon nothing is a credit to nobody; though Lord Chesterfield wrote a very clever poem upon nothing. John Neal. | 45 | ||||||||
| It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them. Generally, also, a downright fact may be told in a plain way; and we want downright facts at present more than anything else. Ruskin. | 46 | ||||||||
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