#brevity

Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon. ↗

— Edsger Dijkstra

#avoiding #brevity #jargon #while

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. ↗

— Walter Pater

#awful #brevity #desperate #effort #experience

To write good poems is the secret of brevity. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #literature #literature-quotes #poems #poetry

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

— Blaise Pascal

#conciseness #correspondence #humor #letters #pithy

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

#humor #religion #humor

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

#brevity #humor #art

Had we but world enough and time.... ↗

— Andrew Marvell

#life

The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all. ↗

— St. Bede

#agnosticism #brevity #happiness #life #religion

I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story. ↗

— Annie Proulx

#brevity #find #i #intellectually #intensity

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction. ↗

— Hosea Ballou

#correction #parents